The News
California Governor Gavin Newsom drew applause at the World Economic Forum in Davos Thursday with a heated denunciation of President Donald Trump — but also rejected the growing Davos consensus that Trump represents a permanent breach in the American-led global order.
Newsom spoke a day after Trump grudgingly backed off threats to seize Greenland, and two days after Canadian Prime Minister captivated the global forum by declaring that US allies needed to acknowledge a permanent “rupture” in the global systems and begin hedging their bets by deeper engagement with China.
“These relationships are in dormancy. They’re not dead,” Newsom told me in a Thursday morning interview. “I don’t use those binary terms. Don’t fall prey to that. That’s a bit hyperbolic.”
Newsom drew repeated applause from an audience in the Congress Center that included European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde for heated denunciations of Trump, who he painted as an anomalous figure who “will be remembered in years, not decades.” Newsom denounced “corruption and graft at a scale we’ve never seen in American history,” and waved red kneepads at CEOs and American politicians he painted as frightened and subservient.
“I respect what Carney did because he has courage of convictions. He stood up,” Newsom said. But he also lamented that Carney’s deal with Beijing would involve “introducing low cost, high quality electric vehicles, not made in Michigan or Detroit, but overseas, into Canada.
“It says everything you know about the recklessness of America’s foreign policy,” Newsom said. “It’s a remarkable thing to break down 80-plus years of alliances. It takes decades and decades to build trust in organisations …. It takes weeks, tweets, hours, minutes, sometimes to destroy it.”
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Newsom also defended his decision to “fight fire with fire” by responding to Trump and his aides with the personal, sometimes sexual, social media jibes the White House directs at their enemies.
“it’s deeply unbecoming. Come on. Of course it is. It’s not what we should be doing,” he said. “But you’ve got to point out the absurdity. You got to put a mirror up to this.” He proceeded to describe Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who had attacked Newsom as a Ken doll, as appearing “as if he was reading a diary and had just broken up with someone.”
Newsom also criticized a proposal by a California union to fund health care with a one-time wealth tax on the state’s super rich. “We’re competing with 50 states,” he said. Capital flows and moves …. The impact of that has to be considered in the context of how freely capital can move and how that’s already occurred..” He added that the if the proposed referendum gets on the ballot, it would lose.
Ben’s view
Newsom has energized American Democrats and their European allies by fighting Trump on his own terms, but some of the most striking parts of our conversation came when I challenged him on Americans’ doubts about Democratic governance in states and cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as New York and Chicago.
Newsom’s response to that question — perhaps the largest hanging over his likely presidential campaign in 2028 — is an unabashed rejection of its premise. He rejected the notion that government — rather than environmental conditions — bore responsibility for devastating Los Angeles fires, defended extending state health insurance to undocumented migrants, and blew past my question about how the state could run a deficit amid a historic AI boom.
“California has figured it out in many respects,” Newsom told me, touting the state’s growing number of tech giants, a new wave of venture capital pouring into its companies, and OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters even as the state spends heavily on social programs. “Our entire entrepreneurial system is thriving in our state, where I think we’ve found that balance.”