Governor Newsom, It’s Time to Get Off the Sidelines

Since the election, California Governor Gavin Newsom has gone out of his way to not get under President Donald Trump’s skin. Where Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has repeatedly taken to the airwaves to lambast Trump’s authoritarian regime, and where Maine Governor Janet Mills has stood firm against Trump’s effort to bully and harass and penalize her state over its support for trans athletes, Newsom has taken the opposite route. Once posited as the face of liberal, progressive resistance to Trumpism, Newsom has repeatedly refused to take Trump’s oratorical baits in recent weeks, declining to respond even when Trump insulted him by mangling his name into “Newscum,” while sweet-talking alt-right figures such as Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon on his ill-conceived new podcast and denouncing the Democrats for pushing a “toxic” political brand.

Unlike Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who comprehensively indicted the rampant lawlessness of Trump 2.0 in his marathon 25-hour speech this week, and in so doing likely gained huge cachet amongst the Democratic base, Newsom has remained largely silent. He has, his advisers say, made a conscious decision to leave it to his state’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, to craft a legal pushback against Trump, rather than himself leading the charge against the slew of unconstitutional and immoral policies embarked upon by Trump and his hoodlum facilitators.

None of this, it turns out, has worked to placate Trump in his hostility toward California policies and values.

In the past week, the administration has unveiled a raft of actions against California and Newsom’s progressive agenda. It has attacked state policies on protecting transgender students in schools; university admissions and diversity policies; access to financial benefits for undocumented students enrolled in higher-education institutions; and, somewhat, bizarrely, has gone to bat against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department—hardly an agency known as a bastion of progressivism—for allegedly taking too long to approve concealed carry permit applications.

It has also reputedly included the state’s flagship universities—four University of California campuses, including UC Berkeley, the University of Southern California, and Stanford—on a hit list of academic institutions that the administration intends to bring to heel, using the threat of withholding federal funds, much as it did with Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania in the past month.

In its long-running battle—a holdover from Trump 1.0—to end California’s right to set its own emission control standards for vehicles, the administration has made an extraordinary claim that, because of California’s outsize impact on the nation’s vehicle market, Congress should be able to pass legislation overturning the state’s policies on emissions. If this comes to pass, it would represent a staggering power grab by federal authorities from state government.

The escalating assault on California doesn’t stop there. Last Friday, the administration also chose to home in on California as it expanded its efforts to rid the federal Justice Department of any prosecutors not entirely in line with MAGA priorities. It did so by summarily firing Assistant US Attorney Adam Schleifer, a well-respected career prosecutor in Los Angeles who, by tradition, since he wasn’t in the very upper tier of the prosecutor’s office, ought not to have been among those figures replaced by a new administration.

Schleifer’s cardinal sin, it appears, was twofold: He was a Biden-era appointee and, perhaps more pertinently, he was involved in ongoing investigations of tax evasion against businessman Andrew Wiederhorn, a well-heeled donor both to the Trump campaign and to the Republican National Committee. In an era in which the DOJ has become little more than a transactional Trumpist enforcer—witness its efforts to condition the dismissal of corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams on his ongoing commitment to cooperate with Trump on immigration enforcement, and the firing of a federal US pardons attorney for not restoring Trump-supporting actor Mel Gibson’s right to own guns—standing up to a Trump contributor can, it appears, be a career-destroying move.

There seems to be no end to Trump’s enemies list. Since Trump took the oath of office in January, individuals, law firms, universities, and even state governments have been targeted by executive order, by DoJ investigations, by shadowy parts of the immigration enforcement apparatus, not for illegal actions but for viewpoints that run contrary to the cult of MAGA. Even the Smithsonian museums have become ensnared in Trump’s dragnet, with Trump demanding of institutions such as the Museum of African American History that they rein in exhibits that he deems to be illegitimately critical of American history and practices, and that they hew to his particular understanding of the realities of race as a biological reality rather than as a sociological construct used over the centuries to justify oppression. It took Hitler four years to fully consolidate his control over Germany’s museums, to ban whole swaths of art as being “degenerate,” and to then humiliate the artists by putting on a final exhibition of these soon-to-be-disappeared art works. Trump is, apparently, in a rush to go faster than the Führer on this, aiming to take apart the independence of America’s leading museums in only a few months.

Newsom ought to have known from the get-go that playing nice with Trump wouldn’t placate the man. This is an administration of, by, and for, sociopaths. Of course it wasn’t going to give California—a state widely recognized for its liberal politics and its cultural, racial, and religious diversity—a free pass. Of course it wasn’t going to stand back and watch while California sued and sued and sued again to block its unconstitutional policies from becoming the law of the land.

So now the fight has been joined. It’s time for California to stand up, and for its political leadership to flex its muscles. The Golden State has the resources to protect its research universities, in particular, as well as its K-12 schools, its food banks, its access to medical care, its environmental policies from the federal onslaught. Now it must actually provide those guarantees. For without them, California institutions may well ultimately prove as fragile, as vulnerable to predation, as were the top law firms that folded last month, and as has been Columbia University.