The first week of Donald Trump’s return to power has been such a wildfire of action and disruption that the political facedown on the Los Angeles runway will pass largely unnoticed. But the sight of Gavin Newsom – the governor of California, hardly an insignificant role in American life – standing, alone, at the steps descending from Air Force One on Friday, was a startling snapshot.
The new president’s animus for the man he habitually refers to “Gavin Newscum” has been well documented. In recent weeks, he has repeatedly placed the blame for the January fires which engulfed and destroyed entire sections of greater Los Angeles at the governor’s door.
“I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to flow into California,” the president wrote on Truth Social the day after the fires started. “He is the blame for this.”
Since then, Trump has repeated his belief that waters flowing down towards Los Angeles from northern California have been diverted to save a specific fish, the delta smelt.
One of the controversies in the aftermath of the recent fires is that a city reservoir had been drained for repairs for more than a year. Newsom has acknowledged this and has asked for answers from the city’s officials. But the main impossibility faced by fire fighting forces during the worst ravages lay in getting sufficient volumes of water from the city reservoirs to the fire hydrants on the streets where the blaze took hold: the infrastructure was not built to deal with the simultaneous infernos which swept down from the hills.
On Friday, Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, undertook their first official trip, stopping in western North Carolina to meet those affected by the autumn floods before flying across to LA to inspect the devastation in the Palisades.
It would later emerge that White House staff only learned that governor Newsom planned to be there to greet the presidential entourage as they were flying across the Midwest. It spoke volumes for the chasm between the ruling and opposition parties. When the presidential plane touched down, the cameras were trained on Newsom, in denims and casual shirt, as he waited for several long minutes for the Trumps to alight.
But he waited.
On the eve of the visit, Newsom had been pressed to explain why his relationship with Trump had become so poisonous.
“You have to ask him,” he said. “We invited him out there. I’m glad he’s coming out here, I’m grateful that the president is taking the time. I hope he does take time to listen to the people impacted directly by these fires. I hope he gets a chance to visit the folks in Altadena – not just in the Palisades. And I hope he comes with the spirit of co-operation and collaboration. I’ve said this many times: open hand. Not a closed fist.
“We had a great collaboration during Covid. Well established, well defined. I don’t think there was a Democratic governor in the country who worked more collaboratively with the president of the United States. That is my mindset when it comes to emergencies and disasters – no politics and no finger pointing.”
Newsom was one of the Democratic faces and voices the party turned to during its traumatic election season and emerged as an arch-critic of Trump’s. He is of Californian old-stock and, as political imagery goes, might well have been concocted on one of the sturdier film studios in Los Angeles: a tennis-pro lean, smiling 56-year-old with a sweep of silvering hair and a plausible, easy-going articulacy. Trump is an old hand at the power-play greeting in front of the camera at this stage in his political life. Therefore, he will know he was beaten in straight sets when he encountered Newsom at the foot of the plane.
The initial audio was unclear, so the encounter was purely visual. Trump’s attempts to pull Newsom towards him met an equally firm tug in the opposite direction. The president relies on his height to dominate but Newsom is a comfortable 6ft 4 and all the camera saw was the Californian towering over Trump, in his peaked Maga hat, and pointing his finger as he spoke. It was one of the very rare instances in which Trump appeared as subordinate to a political rival.
[ Trump and California governor Gavin Newsom fight over Los Angeles wildfire aidOpens in new window ]
By the time they’d made the short walk towards the cameras, Trump was slapping Newsom on the back and calling him by his first name. It’s one of the contradictions about Trump: on a personal level he wishes even for his enemies to like him.
“It’s like you got hit like a bomb, right? I mean nothing like this has happened before,” the president said consolingly. Newsom nodded but said nothing. He assumed office in 2018 in the middle of the Camp fire, one of the worst fires in California’s history, in which 85 people lost their lives and 150,000 acres were ruined in the town of Paradise. He has faced mudslides, the Covid pandemic and police-civic protest tensions after the George Floyd riots. It has been a torrid period.
In 2022, he was re-elected with 59 per cent of the vote over Republican candidate Brian Dahle. But since then, he has increasingly drawn Trump’s ire. On Thursday, Newsom signed bills for $2.5 billion in California state support to extraordinary damage caused by the January fires. He expressed full confidence that the Trump administration will, in turn, provide California with a similar figure in reimbursement – while at the same time defending the state decision to initiate law suits against the recent executive order ending birthright citizenship.
“‘Trump proof’ is someone else’s words,” he said on Thursday.
“Not ours. I think it was rather prescient. We are already engaged in lawsuits. He has already assaulted the 14th amendment, as regards birthright citizenship. We didn’t have time to wait. That preparedness has put us in a position where we can quickly move with the department of justice to assert ourselves against an assault on a lot of hard-earned progress that goes back to Ronald Reagan, that goes back to the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s. You can do both things at the same time. Nothing personal. It is just reality.”
And that was Newsom’s attitude as he turned up and more or less forced the president of the United States to acknowledge him in public. Nothing personal: just two adult elected officials, meeting as adults.
For the Democratic masses still dealing with election aftershock, the optics of the moment may have forced the uneasy thought that maybe the midsummer answer to defeating Trump might have been as simple as putting a figure as camera-comfortable – and white, and male – as Newsom in direct opposition to the Maga cult figure.
But Newsom had no interest in a lightning 100-day campaign and is considered a front-runner among Democratic hopefuls for 2028. His realisation of that ambition will be heavily dependent on the perception of his guidance of Los Angeles’ long-term recovery from these fires. After gatecrashing the president’s arrival, he was not part of the gathering with Los Angeles officials, when Trump both promised federal help in the recovery and rebuilding efforts while outlining his terms and conditions for that help.
“I want the water to come down, to come down to Los Angeles and also go out to all the farmland that’s barren and dry,” Trump told the gathering of officials and politicians from both parties.
“I want voter ID for all the people in California: they all want it. Right now, you don’t have voter ID. You want to have proof of citizenship and ideally you have same day voting. But I want voter ID and the water to be released – and you’re gonna get a lot of help.”
In a spirited back-and-forth with Karen Bass, the beleaguered mayor of Los Angeles, Trump displayed his old property development credentials in waiving all federal regulations that might slow clearance and rebuilding and urging the mayor to allow affected homeowners to get on with the business of clearing their destroyed properties immediately.
By Saturday afternoon, the president had moved on to the Las Vegas for a celebratory rally highlighting his policy to end the tax on tips. But for Democrats still in the midst of a very dark post-election tunnel, Gavin Newsom’s small victory over the ascendant president was, at least, a shard of light.
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