How Trump simply made Gavin Newsom’s day by sending the National Guard to Los Angeles | EUROtoday

On Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom introduced that he would sue President Donald Trump’s administration for seizing management of the state’s National Guard to quell immigration enforcement protests in Los Angeles.

In response, Trump seconded his “border czar” Tom Homan’s risk that he may arrest the governor. “I would do it if I were Tom,” Trump instructed reporters. Just the day earlier than, in an interview with NBC News, Newsom had all however dared Homan to arrest him.

The protests started late final week after Immigrations and Customs Enforcement brokers performed raids and arrests in Los Angeles at a Home Depot that resulted in 44 folks being arrested.

The transfer gave Newsom, who has by no means been in a position to conceal his aspirations for larger workplace, an unimaginable surge of media consideration simply after he acquired months of public derision. In reality, Trump’s struggle on Los Angeles has given California’s Democrats, who’ve lengthy been beleaguered, a brand new life.

While California has lengthy been one of many largest vote banks for the Democrats, lately, it has brought on simply as a lot heartburn for the social gathering.

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During the Covid-19 pandemic, folks fled the state given the excessive price of residing, although it has seen its inhabitants develop previously two years.

California additionally accounted for 1 / 4 of all homeless folks within the United States in 2024, in response to a report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Newsom has all the time had a penchant for the spectacle, going again to his time as mayor of San Francisco, when he carried out same-sex marriages when even Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton publicly opposed marriage for homosexual {couples}.

He relished debating Ron DeSantis, Florida’s ultra-conservative governor, on Fox News and loves happening the community greater than folks may count on a Democrat from liberal San Francisco ought to.

But he’s additionally confronted criticism in latest months for the way he dealt with — or didn’t get a deal with on — the out-of-control wildfires earlier this yr.

He’s additionally ruffled some Democratic feathers together with his choice to talk with conservatives like former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on his podcast. When he spoke with Kirk, he mentioned that permitting transgender athletes to compete in girls’s sports activities was “deeply unfair,” which naturally angered progressives.

But now, Newsom is within the place the place he feels most comfy, in a combative stance pushing again in opposition to the Trump administration.

Like many different Democratic elected officers, he’s weighing whether or not to leap into the 2028 presidential major. If in some way Homan decides to slap some handcuffs, it could give Newsom potent fodder for voters in South Carolina and different early-voting major states.

The similar may be mentioned for Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

During the wildfires, Bass was really not in Los Angeles, however relatively in Ghana, which violated her marketing campaign promise to Angelenos that she wouldn’t journey internationally whereas mayor. When a reporter grilled her about being absent throughout the worst fires within the metropolis’s historical past, she stayed silent.

Bass’ approval rankings plummeted in Los Angeles. And like many different cities with massive Hispanic populations, Los Angeles shifted to the suitable within the 2024 election, although it stays firmly Democratic.

This would put her in a troublesome place going into Los Angeles’s election in 2026, which has a top-two major system the place the 2 highest-vote earners within the major advance to the runoff no matter social gathering.

But Bass, partly fueled by Trump’s federalizing the National Guard and sending them to her doorstep, has since pushed again to defend town she leads.

She has urged folks to stay peaceable, saying: “We do not want to play into the [Trump] administration’s hands.” If Bass is seen as advocating for her metropolis in a second when its massive immigrant inhabitants feels underneath siege, it might pay massive dividends.

Then, in fact, there may be Kamala Harris.

In the months since Trump defeated the previous vice chairman by profitable the favored vote and all seven swing states, Harris has weighed whether or not to hunt the governorship of the Golden State when Newsom’s time period expires or to take one other go at operating for the presidency.

Over the weekend, she denounced Trump’s escalation as “part of the Trump administration’s cruel, calculated agenda to spread panic and division.”

Republicans have cherished to beat up on California, a state they as soon as dominated with luminaries resembling Pete Wilson, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But if Trump and the GOP overstep their mandate, they danger a backlash and amplifying the very liberal politics and insurance policies that they search to quell, and may wind up making them stronger in the long term.