President-elect Trump is not thrilled with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s aggressive, highly visible campaign to shield California from the Trump White House.
“Governor Gavin Newscum is trying to KILL our Nation’s beautiful California,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account on Friday, with his oft-used nickname for the state’s Democratic governor.
Trump’s post came one day after the governor convened a special session of the state Legislature to prepare for potential Republican-led attacks on abortion rights, environmental protections and disaster funding in the liberal state.
Trump wrote that Newsom “is using the term ‘Trump-Proof’ as a way of stopping all of the GREAT things that can be done to ‘Make California Great Again,’ but I just overwhelmingly won the Election.”
Newsom’s preemptive strike signals the return of the hostile relationship between Democratic-controlled California and the Trump administration.
In a video address to small donors and supporters Friday afternoon, Newsom said Trump’s criticism felt familiar.
“It’s a tired, old playbook of grievances. No prescriptions. No solutions. Just grievances,” he said.
The governor’s proclamation for the largely symbolic special session says his administration anticipates that Trump could seek to limit access to abortion medication, pursue a national abortion ban, dismantle environmental protections, repeal the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and withhold federal disaster response funding, among other promises he made during the campaign.
Newsom is asking lawmakers to provide additional funding to the California Department of Justice and other agencies in his administration to immediately file lawsuits and defend against litigation from the Trump administration.
The governor’s aides said increases to the state’s legal defense would be paid for with income tax revenues that have exceeded projections in the current fiscal year, but the amount of funding will be determined in negotiations at the state Capitol. The special session is set to begin Dec. 2.
The president-elect on Truth blasted the “INSANE POLICY DECISIONS” of California’s Democratic leaders, blaming them for people fleeing the expensive state. (State data show that, last year, California’s population increased by 0.17% after three years of losses.)
“They are making it impossible to build a reasonably priced car, the unchecked and unbalanced homeless catastrophe, & the cost of EVERYTHING, in particular ‘groceries,’ IS OUT OF CONTROL,” Trump wrote.
Trump’s social media post included a promise to demand voter identification and proof of citizenship in order to cast ballots. This fall, Newsom signed a law that bans local governments from imposing voter identification requirements.
The president-elect also criticized the “rerouting of MILLIONS OF GALLONS OF WATER A DAY FROM THE NORTH OUT INTO THE PACIFIC OCEAN, rather than using it, free of charge, for the towns, cities, & farms dotted all throughout California.”
Speaking at his Rancho Palos Verdes golf club in September, Trump indicated he would revive his first-term fight with California leaders over water allocations and environmental laws meant to protect endangered fish such as the tiny delta smelt.
He said he would “revert water up into the hills where you have all the dead forests, where the forests are so brittle” in order to prevent wildfires. And he threatened to withhold federal firefighting aid for California unless “Newscum” agreed to “sign those papers” — an apparent reference to water policy, although he did not specify which papers.
In an interview days before the election, the governor cast Trump’s “Newscum” nickname for him as a win.
“We clearly are in his head and that’s a good thing, from my perspective,” Newsom said. “It means we’re doing the right thing.”
Though Trump and Newsom sparred on social media, in the press and the courts during the president-elect’s first term, their relationship wasn’t always fraught. The governor publicly praised Trump on several occasions for providing federal aid for California wildfires. And Trump also used a clip of Newsom commending him for sending COVID-19 testing swabs to California in an ad during his 2020 presidential campaign.
The pair maintained a cordial relationship behind the scenes, but it appears to have ended.
In his video address Friday, Newsom thanked the people who tuned in — 35,000 in total, he said — for their work to help elect Democrats in 2024.
He said he respects the presidency and wants Trump to succeed. But he’s not naive about the president-elect’s agenda.
“We know the playbook,” Newsom said. “He is going to be more, I think, aggressive than he was in the past.”
The special session is about getting prepared, the governor said, as he hinted that he has other moves up his sleeve.
“We’re not done by any stretch,” Newsom said.
