Gavin Newsom on the Week That Changed Everything

This is the week that Gavin Newsom stopped thinking so much.

The governor of California has found himself in a hot swirl of events: Federal authorities are patrolling streets, ICE agents are raiding Home Depots, and protests (most of them peaceful) are spreading across the state. President Donald Trump ordered the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, very much against Newsom’s wishes. He also endorsed the idea of Newsom being arrested. House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested as an alternative that Newsom be “tarred and feathered.” And Senator Alex Padilla of California, whom Newsom appointed to his job in 2021, was forced to the floor and handcuffed by federal agents while trying to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question at a press conference.

“We are not going away,” Noem vowed in Los Angeles, referring to the federal officials she said had come to “liberate this city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country.”

As of this writing, Newsom had not gone away either—in handcuffs, feathers, or otherwise.

He got on the phone with me yesterday to debrief on the turmoil of recent days. Newsom was in his office in Sacramento, preparing for any number of contingencies—including what he would do if the feds actually tried to throw him in jail. He told me that he’d initially shrugged off the chatter about his potential arrest. Tom Homan, Trump’s bull-necked border czar, was the first person Newsom heard mention the prospect. “That Homan, or Hoo-man, guy,” is how Newsom referred to him. “Whatever his name is—the guy with the hat on Fox.”

Then someone sent Newsom a clip of Trump saying that he wished that Homan would, in fact, arrest the floppy-maned governor. “My first instinct was to dismiss it,” Newsom told me. “And my second instinct was: ‘Guys, this is actually not funny.’” He said that he would not put it past Trump: “I’ve known this guy for years.”

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Next came the video of Padilla getting manhandled on Thursday afternoon, which made the threats emanating from the Trump administration even less funny. Newsom was meeting with his staff, discussing strategy for a court hearing in his state’s lawsuit against Trump over the Los Angeles deployments. “What the hell is this?” someone said, and suddenly everyone was huddled around a laptop. “People literally turned their head and were like, ‘This can’t be happening,’” Newsom told me. “It sickened all of us. I mean, people were physically impacted by it.”

Surely it crossed Newsom’s mind that he, too, might find himself in a similar situation. What would he do? What are the protocols when a state’s chief executive gets arrested by federal authorities? Newsom and his staff discussed this possibility. “They put together an all-hands meeting about how they would handle it,” Newsom told me. “I mean, I’m talking a little out of school,” he acknowledged. One key takeaway: Do not resist arrest under any circumstances, Newsom was told, “because that would be grounds for the actual arrest.”

Newsom has been talking a lot about how Trump is crashing through new guardrails every day. After a certain point, it becomes hard—or impossible—to revert to whatever the previous norms and rules were.

Newsom himself has crossed a line of his own. Like many Democrats in the Trump era, the governor has been prone to overthinking things at times, worrying about scaring off swing voters by playing to woke stereotypes. Polls, too, have suggested over the years that voters generally approve of Trump’s proactive approach to immigration enforcement, and Democrats have been wary of being seen as weak on the issue.

In Newsom’s case, he has battled a perception of being slick and eager to cater to all sides. He recently launched a podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom, and has taken criticism from the left because of his willingness to host MAGA guests such as Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk. Fairly or not, Newsom’s reputation for opportunism and political expediency comes up in seemingly every discussion of his presidential prospects.

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Now the Los Angeles clash has provided Newsom with a national showcase he’s never had before. For an ambitious Democrat, there are worse places to be than co-starring in a righteous showdown with Trump. “Donald Trump’s government isn’t protecting our communities. They’re traumatizing our communities, and that seems to be the entire point,” Newsom said in a prime-time address he delivered Tuesday that earned widespread praise from Democrats.

The governor resists discussing this crisis in political terms, but he did describe the episode to me as perhaps the most consequential of his career—even more than when he was mayor of San Francisco and established himself as a national figure by granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2004. “This is the one for me,” Newson said of the recent discord. “This one is—this is not political. This is literally about looking your kids in the eyes.”

He has cast the stakes of the conflict as fundamental to preserving democracy against the “authoritarian tendencies” of a rogue president. “He is not a monarch. He is not a king,” Newsom said of Trump, speaking to reporters in San Francisco on Thursday. “He should stop acting like one.”

Newsom told me that he recently discovered a change in how he was reacting to events—that he was feeling less restrained and bogged down. “It was, I think, Sunday,” he said. “Sunday, I woke up a different guy.” If nothing else, being subjected to the full force of the federal government can be liberating, just as seeing troops in the street can be clarifying. The events of the past few days go to “the very essence of why the fuck I am even here,” he said.

Newsom said it is “critical” that Americans engage in visible protest against the military parade that Trump has planned in Washington, D.C., today for the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday, as well as the president’s own 79th. It is just as “critical,” he added, that the protests be peaceful. “You have these idiots, these assholes, these anarchists,” Newsom said, referring to the inevitable pockets of trouble that arise at such events. These people “have the same chaos theory of life that Donald Trump has. They want to sow chaos, and they’re no different than he is.” He said the tension in the United States was at a “slow boil,” and now everything is even more precarious.

“You could lose this thing so fast,” he said. “We’re on the other side.”