Trump presidency ‘as we know it’ ends in November, says California’s Gavin Newsom

Governor of California Gavin Newsom is pictured during a recorded interview with AFP in the Manhattan borough of New York City on Sept 23. Newsom is widely seen as a leading contender for the Democrats’ 2028 presidential nomination.

NEW YORK - California Governor Gavin Newsom has a prediction for November: Democrats retake the House, and Donald Trump’s presidency “as we know it” is over.

“We’re going to take back the House of Representatives. It’s a day of reckoning, a new day coming,” Newsom told AFP and two other outlets, after a UN climate summit in New York.

“Trump’s presidency, as we know it, ends in November,” said the 58-year-old outgoing Democratic leader of the nation’s most populous state, widely seen as a leading contender for his party’s 2028 presidential nomination.

Newsom, who spoke in an interview on Sept 23 as part of a journalism initiative called Covering Climate Now, did not give details on how he thinks a Democratic win would in essence end the Trump presidency.

But if Trump’s Republicans lose control of one or both houses of Congress, Democrats can in fact curb the president’s expansive agenda – though the executive still wields considerable power.

Newsom also insisted climate was winning politics – if framed not as a “green” issue but as one tied to everything from grocery prices to home insurance to national security.

“People say ‘why the hell are you talking about that, you should be talking about the kitchen table,’ I said ‘I am!’”

He pointed to the price of beef and coffee, and the challenges of insuring a home or getting a mortgage amid growing climate risks from more extreme wildfires to coastal erosion supercharged by El Nino.

Other politicians shy away from the subject, he said, “because they don’t know how to talk about it, and those that have talked about in the past have been accused of being soft, weak, effete, green, hyperbolic.”

He conceded that “some of our language did get a little apocalyptic.” The key, he said, is hammering home that “it’s not about electric power; it’s about economic power. It’s about statecraft.”

At the summit, he pitched California as proof that climate action and growth go hand in hand, saying the state – the world’s fourth-largest economy, whose GDP has grown 40 per cent since 2019 – had run on 100 per cent clean energy for at least part of the day on 90 per cent of days this year.

His administration has battled Trump and congressional Republicans over efforts to undo California’s green rules – from scrapping its planned phase-out of gasoline cars to paying companies to abandon offshore wind projects.

“Donald Trump wants to recreate the 19th century,” said Newsom. “He’s doubling down on stupid. He’s putting America in reverse.”

“Whoever the nominee is of the Democratic Party is going to be the next president of the United States,” he said.

Any of the Democratic hopefuls, he added, would be “exponentially better than a Rubio or Vance that have countenanced this corruption, this grift, this graft, this destruction of truth and trust and institutions,” referring to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice-President J.D. Vance.

They are seen as the likely Republican front-runners, though neither has declared.

Vice-President J.D. Vance (left) and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are seen as the likely Republican front-runners for the 2028 presidential election, though neither has declared.

Left-wing Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) made waves this week when she told the New York Times she was weighing a run, musing about whether a Latina could win in a country that rejected female nominees in 2016 and 2024.

AOC, Newsom and Jon Ossoff, a charismatic Jewish senator from Georgia, are among the favourites on betting markets.

“She absolutely could become the nominee of the party. That’s my assessment of electability. This notion that a woman can’t win is insulting,” Newsom said, blaming “punditry” for perpetuating the trope.

“I’m done with people talking like that. Or that if you’re from California or you’re Jewish or you’re old or you’re too young – give me a damn break. Our politics is completely scrambled post-Trump. The old rules, they do not apply.”

Though he called Ocasio-Cortez a “generational talent,” he pointedly did not rule out running against her – having told CNN emphatically last week that he would not challenge Kamala Harris, the 2024 nominee, with whom he shares a history in California that predates politics.

“It’s a different framework,” he said. “I don’t have a relationship that goes back to before we were both in politics. I don’t have a relationship in the context of our base overlaying in remarkable ways.

Whether Newsom runs, he said, depends on whether he can “look them and you in the eye and say I have something unique they don’t... voice, experience, perspective, capacity that is unique and distinctive.” AFP