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In the opening weeks of Donald Trump’s second term, Gavin Newsom wagered that peacemaking was best: a tarmac greeting for Air Force One, an Oval Office visit and a podcast slot for Maga’s biggest names. But then Trump came for California, and its governor dropped the niceties.
With a flood of all-caps social media posts, a counterpunching redistricting proposal and a string of lawsuits challenging the new administration, Newsom is not just taking on Trump, he’s stealing his tactics: fight, fight, fight.
“We’ve got to wake up, disabuse ourselves as Democrats,” Newsom said on a podcast this week. “I’m sick of being weak. I’m sick of being effete. I’m sick of being non-consequential. It’s not good enough to say it – it’s time to do.”
Newsom has charged on to the national stage as a recast political brawler willing to wield power as ruthlessly as the other side. On Thursday, he signed a redistricting plan and declared a special election this fall that would ask voters to redraw the state’s congressional boundaries to give Democrats as many as five additional US House seats in next year’s midterm elections.
The ballot measure is a direct attempt to “neuter and neutralize” Texas’s partisan gerrymander – engineered at Trump’s behest to safeguard Republicans’ fragile House majority. At a bill-signing ceremony, Newsom pointed to the president’s claim that he was “entitled” to five additional congressional seats in the Lone Star state: “That should put chills up your spine.”
Now the California referendum transforms an off-cycle election year into a high-stakes national showdown that could determine control of Congress – and set the stage for 2028. For Newsom, who’s term-limited and widely viewed as a presidential contender, the success – or failure – of this 11-week sprint could carry major consequences for his political future.
The ballot measure gives voters in deep-blue California a chance to strike back at Trump, who has relentlessly tormented the state since returning to the White House. But by temporarily overriding California’s independent redistricting commission – long a point of pride in the Golden state – Democrats are being asked to “compromise their own values,” said Kim Nalder, a political science professor at California State University, Sacramento.
“That’s been a guiding light for a lot of Democrats – the whole ‘they go low, we go high’ idea,” she said. “One of the risks is that the Democratic party – and Newsom himself – become associated with this all-out brawl, no-holds-barred fighting, rather than having a particular set of political principles that they stand by no matter what.”
How Californians will decide remains uncertain. A Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll released on Friday shows 48% of registered voters in the state support Newsom’s redistricting plan, compared with 32% who oppose it. Another 20% are undecided, providing an opening for either campaign to make their pitch.
“If Proposition 50 passes, and Californians succeed in adding more House seats, and is partially, if not completely, responsible for flipping the House next year, he’s a hero, plain and simple,” said Bill Whalen, a Hoover Institution fellow who was a speechwriter for Pete Wilson, the former Republican governor of California.
Even if the initiative falls short in November, Whalen believes Newsom still benefits. “He still gets credit among those same Democrats for fighting the good fight,” he said. “I don’t see how he fails.”
The all-out political war between the president and California’s governor erupted earlier this summer, when Trump seized control of California’s national guard and deployed US marines to Los Angeles, over Newsom’s objections, to suppress protests against the federal immigration crackdown. The raids are ongoing, and Trump has targeted the state in other ways: an attempt to strip federal funding from UCLA, and tariffs that threaten California’s economy – the fourth largest in the world.
Newsom has argued that Trump was not just a threat to his state – but to the entire 249-year-old American project. While his approach might offend virtue-minded Democrats, he says the moment demands it.
“Yes, I’ve changed,” he said recently in a local news interview. “The facts have changed. We need to change.”
In recent weeks, as Newsom has stepped up his attacks on Trump as a “weak” and a “failed” leader, his social media team has trolled the president online – unleashing a jumble of unfiltered, stream-of-consciousness rants, AI-generated political fan art and schoolyard taunts, some of it signed with the governor’s initials, GCN, meant to parody the president’s own chaotic posting style.
Newsom says he’s simply holding up a mirror. “If you’ve got issues with what I’m putting out,” he told reporters last week, “you sure as hell should have concerns about what he’s putting out as president.”
The posts have gone viral – racking up millions of views, thousands of comments and driving a flood of engagement. They’ve also caught the attention of the right. Fox News hosts, Kid Rock, JD Vance and even Trump himself have all taken the bait, provoking what the governor’s staff gleefully dubbed “Maga meltdowns”.
“JESSE WATTERS KEPT CALLING ME ‘DADDY’ (VERY WEIRD, NOT INTERESTED, BUT THANK YOU!)” his office clapped back, in an 188-word tweet about Fox News’s breathless coverage of Newsom’s furious posting streak.
“Gavin Newsom can mimic Donald Trump all that he wants to,” Vance told Fox News host Laura Ingraham this week, “they’re still going to lose unless they get better policies that actually serve the American people.”
Trump, for his part, weighed in on his own social media platform, Truth Social, vowing to save “the Once Great State of California” from “Newscum”.
Newsom’s office fired back with a wink: “Triggered?”
The Berkley poll suggested that California voters back his gloves-off strategy by a nearly two-to-one margin, with just 29% saying they’d prefer a more cooperative approach. The tougher posture lands especially well with younger voters: 71% of Californians under 30 say they approve.
This week, in a blitz of media appearances, Newsom escalated his rhetoric.
“We’re fighting fire with fire,” he said on The Siren podcast last week. “And we’re going to punch these sons of bitches in the mouth.”
The response was telling: no Democratic moralizing, no rebuke from party leaders, no pressure on Newsom to apologize. Instead, his team promoted the interview to his legions of new followers and supporters replied with MAGAesque AI images of Newsom as a superhero.
“People are just not used to seeing this kind of rough around the edges, non-poll-tested messaging coming from Democrats,” said Olivia Julianna, a 22-year-old Democratic activist from Texas and social media influencer who interviewed Newsom for the episode. “It’s real, it’s raw, it’s authentic, and it shows that he’s a fighter.”
As Democrats brace for the loss of up to five US House seats in her state, under the redistricting plan approved by the Texas legislature on Saturday, Julianna said voters alarmed by Trump’s increasingly brazen power grabs are desperate for leaders who offer more than just fighting words.
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“We want to feel like someone is standing on the frontlines ready to go to battle for us,” she said. “And that’s what it feels like Gavin Newsom is doing.”
Newsom’s new fight-fire-with-fire strategy isn’t always trained on Trump.
When the Bed Bath & Beyond chair announced this week that he wouldn’t reopen stores in the state, calling it “overregulated, expensive and risky”, Newsom’s press office fired back. “After their bankruptcy and closure of every store, like most Americans, we thought Bed, Bath & Beyond no longer existed,” it said. “We wish them well in their efforts to become relevant again.”
He’s also taken on his own party. Earlier this year, he declared the Democratic brand “toxic” in an interview with provocateur Bill Maher – a diagnosis backed by polling and voter registration trends, but striking language for leader of the largest blue state who could seek his party’s nomination.
He enraged progressives – already wary of his record on housing and homelessness – when he questioned the fairness of transgender women competing in women’s sports during a conversation with rightwing agitator Charlie Kirk on the inaugural episode of his podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom. The comments marked a split from other top Democrats on the issue and rattled some of his LGBTQ+ allies.
In response to a Guardian story about the loss of care for trans youth in California, a Newsom spokesperson said critics should point the finger at Trump, not at a governor whose “record supporting the trans community is unmatched”.
“Everyone wants to blame Gavin Newsom for everything. But instead of indulging in Newsom derangement syndrome, maybe folks should look to Washington,” the spokesperson said – invoking a pejorative phrase, “derangement syndrome”, used by Trump supporters to mock the president’s detractors.
While his sharper tone angered some on the left, Newsom’s redistricting gambit has managed to unite progressives and establishment Democrats – and his once-stalled approval rating has jumped.
The California plan has drawn praise from across the party, including Barack Obama, who called it “a responsible approach”, and the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi. With his plan in motion, he challenged other blue state leaders to follow suit, laying down the gauntlet for fellow Democratic governors with presidential ambitions as Trump expands his push to secure Republican advantages in states such as Indiana, Ohio and Missouri.
That aggressive posture – in effect becoming an “anti-Trump troll” – has been cathartic for many Democrats, Nalder said.
“Democrats nationwide have been feeling like the Trump administration has been punching their values and their party and democracy itself in the face repeatedly day after day and they’re just ready for somebody to punch the bully back,” she said. “And Newsom right now looks like he could be that guy.”
Newsom’s campaign faces mounting opposition from Republicans, including those not in Trump’s Maga camp. The popular former Republican governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a longtime Trump critic and advocate of independent redistricting. Schwarzenegger posted a photo of himself pressing weights in a shirt that read: “F*** THE POLITICIANS, TERMINATE GERRYMANDERING.”
Former House speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, has also vowed to pump money into what some observers predict could quickly become one of the most expensive contests in Golden state history.
“The voters of California have a say,” he said in an interview on CNN this week. “If you truly believe in your power of your own vote, you should vote against this.”
Newsom has raised more than $6.2m from 200,000 donations in the week since he officially launched the ballot campaign at a rally in Los Angeles last week, according to his team.
There, Newsom stood side by side with labor leaders, members of the teacher’s union and the head of California’s Planned Parenthood. The plan even earned the endorsement of Sara Sadhwani, a Democrat who served on California’s 2020 independent redistricting commission, who declared ruefully that “extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures”.
As Newsome spoke at the Japanese American National Museum’s National Center for the Preservation of Democracy earlier this month, federal agents, armed and masked, fanned out across the complex. Newsom said their presence could not have been coincidental.
The next day, his office filed a freedom of information request to get information about the administration’s involvement in the decision to send border patrol agents to that location.
It was just more fuel for Newsom’s argument: his campaign is not just about congressional districts, but a referendum on Trump – and American democracy.
“Donald Trump, you have poked the bear,” Newsom says in a new campaign ad, as the camera flashes to the grizzly on the state’s flag. “And we will punch back.”
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