Will Gavin Newsom's feud with Trump help or hurt the California governor?

In less than a week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom abandoned the uneasy armistice he forged with President Donald Trump after January’s wildfires. He dared federal officials to arrest him over his handling of immigration protests in Los Angeles, while competing narratives of whether the city had descended into anarchic chaos or was being steamrolled by a vindictive administration played out on social media and in the press.

The governor spent most of the weekend through Tuesday posting glib clips of his interviews with national news outlets and liberal YouTube streamers, sparring with Republicans online and sending fundraising emails from his Campaign for Democracy PAC.

It’s a familiar playbook for the media-conscious governor who relishes trading blows with his sometime political foe — but experts say it’s a losing proposition to enter into conflict with the White House for someone believed to be preparing to run for president in 2028.

The governor has made some of his harshest remarks on record of the president in the last three days, calling him a “stone cold liar” and “authoritarian.” Trump has fired back, calling Newsom “grossly incompetent” and suggested he would invoke the Insurrection Act, which lets the military act as law enforcement when civilian police can’t.

Trump claimed he called Newsom on Monday, but Newsom said the two have not spoken since last Friday.

“I don’t see Newsom winning this one,” said Tobe Berkovitz, a veteran campaign media strategy consultant.

Historically, tough talk and action trumps cooler rhetoric in politics.

“One of the first things I taught my political campaign students is: don’t wrestle with a pig. No way you come out looking good at something like that,” said Berkovitz, associate professor emeritus of advertising at Boston University.

While Californians see the immersive coverage of the Los Angeles protests, and are more attuned to the nuances, people outside the state do not. Trump-allied Republicans and right-wing media claimed the protests against immigration raids — as ordered by Trump aide Stephen Miller, a Santa Monica native — are actually violent insurrections.

Newsom said the Pentagon’s sending of 700 Marines and 4,000 National Guardsmen to Los Angeles, an unprecedented and potentially illegal use of presidential power, was an extreme overreaction to peaceful dissent. He and Attorney General Rob Bonta have filed two lawsuits asking a federal judge to block the moves and declare them illegal.

“The average person sitting halfway across the country they’re looking at that and they see the violence and burning cars,” said Brad Coker, president of Florida-based Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy.

Part of Newsom’s issue is that he has not been well defined in the national public eye.

An Economist/YouGov national poll taken between May 30 and June 2 found 30% of those surveyed didn’t know of the governor. Of those who said they did, 28% saw him favorably and 42% unfavorably. Two California pollsters found that Newsom’s recent political pivot did not endear him to state voters, either.

‘Bully pulpit’

But there is some potentially good news in all this for Newsom.

While he’s tried to appear more centrist recently, Newsom’s tough talk and efforts at resisting Trump’s use of the National Guard and Marines ally him squarely with the party’s progressive wing.

“In our federalist form of government, it is the governor of a state who deploys the National Guard — not the president of the United States,” said Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a progressive independent. “This is just another example of Trump wanting more power for himself and ignoring the law.”

Political organizer Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the progressive organization Our Revolution, said it was good that Newsom was willing to fight the administration in the absence of a cohesive Democratic opposition.

“I think the fact that Gavin Newsom is willing to pick a fight and the state is suing the administration, those are good steps,” said Geevarghese.

“We do need someone with a bully pulpit that, you know, it’s not maybe as large as Donald Trump’s, but we do need somebody like Gavin Newsom to fight back and so that’s good.”

At the same time, most social media platforms and news outlets are controlled by conservative-leaning actors, putting Newsom and Democrats at a disadvantage.

“I think Newsom could win a fight with Trump if he’s able to move his message effectively in the conservative right wing media landscapee,” Geervaghese said. “It’s uneven footing right now, but I would argue that the challenge for Democrats is we just don’t have the echo chamber.”

“In a battle that’s really about optics, and, you know, images and narrative, that’s where the challenge is: can Gavin Newsom effectively frame Trump as abusing power and impeding the rights of local people? But the challenge is, he doesn’t control the level, the bandwidth of communication that Trump in the right wing has in terms of framing the story.”

Other cities are planning to host more demonstrations, including the upcoming nationwide “No Kings” day of protest on Saturday.

“Our role here is to really focus on organizing the grassroots and to create the counter narrative to what Donald Trump is doing and to really say, ‘Look where people are. American citizens are worried and they’re engaged in peaceful protest against the administration’s policies,’” Geervaghese said.

“And I think that’s what next weekend sets up, as a powerful rejoinder to what’s happening in Los Angeles, and hopefully a warning that he should think twice about deploying troops into other jurisdictions.”

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