The Democrat taking the fight to Trump admits, ‘Yes, he’s winning’

The US system doesn’t provide a formal position for a leader of the opposition. The aspirants have to forge one for themselves. Increasingly, Gavin Newsom is being nominated by friends, foes and pollsters as the new titleholder.

And the California governor thinks America today confronts a profound crisis after the assassination of US far-right activist Charlie Kirk: “I am deeply concerned about the next few weeks and months. It’s a helluva moment in our country,” he tells me in a phone interview this week from the governor’s office in Sacramento.

Former president Barack Obama this week said America was at “an inflection point”. Newsom says that “on the other side of this, there may be something radically different”.

Before Kirk’s death, Trump already had lit a match under the gunpowder of American politics, according to Newsom. Now, the Trump administration’s rhetoric of retribution is “an accelerant” applied to the flame, he says.

The angry, vengeful threats from Trump, his vice president JD Vance and his policy adviser Stephen Miller “should send chills down anyone’s spine”. The administration has promised a crackdown on the “radical left”.

Trump said: “We have to beat the hell out of them.” Miller said “a vast domestic terror movement” was fomenting political violence.

“With God as my witness,” said Miller, the man who designed Trump’s mass-deportation program, “we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”

Trump’s first step this week was to sue The New York Times for $US15 billion ($22.7 billion), an act of intimidation, supposedly for the crime of being a “mouthpiece for the Radical Left Democrat Party”. It’s the latest in a series of personal suits against media outlets to deter or punish unfavourable coverage.

Then, after Newsom issued his dark premonition, the Trump administration successfully pressed for the cancellation of a TV satirist – Jimmy Kimmel – for making false and insensitive remarks about the Kirk killing. Trump celebrated by proposing that TV networks should have their broadcasting licences revoked for allowing commentary critical of him. The acid verdict of US news outlet Quartz was: “In today’s Washington, the joke only survives if the chairman laughs.”

Next, Trump listed Antifa as a terrorist organisation, although it’s a movement rather than an organisation. The president threatened to pursue anyone funding it. Vance said: “There is no unity with the people who fund these articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathisers.”

‘I’ll be candid with you. I’m pretty embarrassed by how complicit so many countries have been in aiding and abetting Trump and Trumpism.’

California Governor Gavin Newsom

He nominated two respected and long-established philanthropic NGOs as targets. He proposed an examination of the tax concessions granted to the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros. Their crime? He claimed they’d helped fund a left-inclined news magazine, The Nation.

MAGA megaphone and former Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon rejected a call for national unity by Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah, where Charlie Kirk was murdered. “No, Cox, we’re not looking for unity. We’re looking for victory,” said Bannon. “It’s time to make a stand.”

This is the America that Anthony Albanese flies into this weekend. A country that once was regarded as the leader of the free world is now in the midst of an authoritarian political purge.

Newsom volunteers his opinion that Australia is a vital future partner for America. And that he hopes it refuses to be complicit in Trump’s authoritarian turn.

“I’m proud of our alliances,” he tells me. “I’ve said this to ambassador [Kevin] Rudd, and I believe that I think one of the most important relationships for the US in the next decade-plus is Australia, in relationship to China, in relation to competition and how the globe is reshaping, in relation to AUKUS.”

And the governor hopes Australia will not condone Trump’s anti-democratic practices: “I’ll be candid with you. I’m pretty embarrassed by how complicit so many countries have been in aiding and abetting Trump and Trumpism. I’m pretty disgusted by it, to be candid with you. I know folks know better. I’ve talked to these leaders. They know what they’re doing.

“They’re doing exactly what so many corporations are doing and so many billionaires. They’re just trying to get through this period. I just hate to see people cave so easily and quickly.”

He says Trump’s use of tariffs is unconstitutional – the tariff power is vested in Congress, not the White House – and that it should be defied.

Albanese tentatively expects to meet Trump in New York at a reception hosted by the US president on Tuesday evening.

The leader of America’s most populous and economically hefty state is ahead of all other Democrat presidential contenders in the polls. Most telling is what his foes say. Trump talks about Newsom far more than any other potential challenger, according to a Washington Post tally.

And that didn’t count the time when the president called for Newsom’s arrest for defying Trump’s order to send US Marines and National Guard troops into Los Angeles. Or the many times he’s called him by the pet name Trump has bestowed: “Gavin Newscum”. Witty, no?

Bannon last month said Newsom was “the only person in the Democratic Party who is organising a fight that they feel they can win”.

But who does Newsom think is winning? He’s promised to “fight fire with fire”, challenging Trump in the courts in more than 40 lawsuits, calling a special state election in an effort to gerrymander more California Democrats into Congress to offset a Texas effort to gerrymander more Republicans into Congress, and satirising Trump’s social media performances by mimicking them. “Gavin Newsom is owning the MAGAs,” said a recent CNN headline. “How far can he take it?”

But asked if it’s Trump who’s actually triumphing, Newsom replies emphatically: “Yes, he’s winning, absolutely. It’s about the consolidation of power. It’s about the erosion of truth and independent governance. It’s a story about the fragmented opposition as well. As a member of the Democratic Party, I recognise that. Trump’s taking advantage.

“It’s also a story of complete complicity by Congress and the courts, particularly the Supreme Court. He has total primacy over Congress and the courts. The assault on cultural institutions is certainly consistent. Even sporting events, from tennis to football, taking every cultural institution, the arts, institutions that promote independent thinking, like universities. We’ve seen this full-on assault, law firms and universities and scientific and medical research. We see domestic use of the military, the police forces.”

Newsom saw in Kirk an opportunity to explore options for dialogue between America’s riven left and right. The Democrat governor invited Kirk to be the first guest on the podcast he launched early this year, and the pair maintained contact. “We are going to have to figure out a way to live and advance together across our differences,” Newsom says. People can disagree without demonising each other. “Divorce is not an option.”

But the murder of Kirk snuffed out that dialogue. Newsom condemns the killing: “This tragic incident, and it is tragic, is unacceptable political violence, period, full stop. But this climate of emergency equally should be condemned.

“I’m rather taken by the fact that more people are not expressing more concern. I’m actually shocked. I’m watching things erode on an hourly, not even a daily, weekly basis.”

A professor of political history at Rutgers University, David Greenberg, doesn’t share Newsom’s alarm: “With the administration’s crackdown on extremist left-wing organisations, I remain sceptical that this will mean that perfectly benign book clubs or church rallies will be in the cross-hairs.

“More upsetting is the prevalence of political violence of an extreme kind that I find hard to get inured to. For some years now, we have entered a landscape where some people feel justified using political violence to exercise political grudges and hatreds.” The political discourse is fuelling this, he says.

Greenberg gives credit to Newsom for emerging as the Democrat frontrunner: “The voters wanted someone to stand up to Donald Trump. Newsom has taken this defiant, combative stance.”

But, he says, Newsom is doing something more; he is doing two things that are apparently contradictory. “At the same time as he’s emerged as the resistance leader, he’s also taken a more centrist sociopolitical position. He’s engaged with right-wing people, he’s made comments on trans people in sport” – trans women should not be permitted to play in women’s events, says Newsom.

“And I think both are needed from a potential Democratic presidential candidate. He’s trying to stake out a moderate, mainstream middle ground while standing up to Trump.”

But, at this rate, will America ever hold fair and free elections again? Newsom fears not: “This is an extraordinary efficiency that we’re seeing from Trump; it’s surgical. The implementation of a vision.

“There’s no doubt in my mind he does not want to have another election. If he does, it will be a Putin-type election. The pretence of an election, but not fair, not open. I absolutely am convinced of that. And in the path we are on, the path that is now being accelerated in real time, how do you deal with that?”

Peter Hartcher is the international editor

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