
Newsom and California confront Trump with a potential blueprint for Democrats
CNN
Democratic politicians have spent the last few months talking about standing up to President Donald Trump in his second term. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is among the first faced with figuring out what standing up actually looks like.
Democratic politicians have spent the last few months talking about standing up to President Donald Trump in his second term. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is among the first faced with figuring out what standing up actually looks like. Allies and opponents agree how Newsom handles the protests – including Trump’s calling in the National Guard and sending in active-duty Marines over the governor’s objections – will reverberate far beyond California, and long after this week. That’s how Newsom is approaching what has become a fight on the streets and in the courts, only a few days after he was responding to a Trump administration effort to identify federal grants going to the state that can be canceled. Other Democratic governors have been calling Newsom, checking in, ticking through scenarios in their minds of how what’s happened in California could play out at home for them, according to multiple people briefed on the conversations. Every Democratic governor signed onto a statement over the weekend calling Trump’s call-up of the National Guard an “alarming abuse of power,” but they have been treading carefully since then, their eyes on both the politics of potentially triggering Trump and on the legal concerns of how their words might be used in lawsuits they might have to bring. Newsom, people familiar with his thinking say, wants California to hold the line after some universities and law firms facing White House pressure reached concession deals with the administration.

Vivek Ramaswamy barreled into politics as a flame-thrower willing to offend just about anyone. He declared America was in a “cold cultural civil war,” denied the existence of white supremacists, and referred to one of his rivals as “corrupt.” Two years later, Ramaswamy says he wants to be “conservative without being combative.”












