Politics
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Hiding in Plain Sight
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Might 8, 2025
California officers shored up the state’s defenses to reply to Donald Trump’s lawless actions. However can their “Trump-proofing” technique maintain the road?
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California Governor Gavin Newsom (R) speaks as California Legal professional Gneral Rob Bonta seems on throughout a information convention at Gemperle Orchard on April 16, 2025, in Ceres, California.
(Picture by Justin Sullivan / Getty Photos)
Sworn in because the governor of California in January 2019, Gavin Newsom appeared to please in selecting fights along with his archenemy, Donald Trump, throughout the president’s first time period. Newsom signed a invoice (subsequently overturned by the courts) that might have required presidential candidates to launch their tax returns to qualify for the state’s poll; he denounced Trump in fiery language for pulling out of the Paris local weather accords and for his different anti-environmental actions; and he lambasted the president’s “incompetence” and “corruption.” Because of this, he grew to become one thing of a poster baby for anti-Trumpism, a political chief who wasn’t afraid to forcefully push again towards the MAGA chief’s bullying ways and administrative priorities.
Instantly following the 2024 election, it appeared that the sample would repeat itself. Nonetheless governor, having survived a recall marketing campaign after which been reelected in 2022 in a landslide, Newsom convened a particular legislative session to shore up California’s defenses, warning that Trump’s election would end in new assaults on reproductive freedoms, environmental protections, and immigrant communities, in addition to the weaponization of “grant applications to commandeer state and native authorities assets for federal functions.” The governor referred to as on legislators to satisfy and supply further funding to the state’s justice division in order that it will be higher outfitted to guard California’s very important pursuits, and to develop laws to guard susceptible residents from the anticipated federal onslaught.
Lower than a month later, on December 2, legislators gathered within the ornate State Capitol in Sacramento, the place they authorised a $50 million infusion of money for the state’s justice division. It was an funding in “Trump-proofing” California, the state’s political leaders stated, one that might carry enormous dividends ought to the lawsuits it will doubtless be submitting over the approaching years protect California’s entry to federal funds for catastrophe reduction, schooling, and transportation, in addition to its main environmental requirements and analysis establishments. Trump had already threatened California on all of those points in response to California’s SB 54, the California Values Act, a 2017 legislation limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities. The lawmakers additionally produced concepts for future laws, particularly round defending state information on undocumented immigrants—which could possibly be utilized by the feds as a street map to comb up giant numbers of undocumented residents—in addition to increasing the state’s no-go zones for ICE brokers.
Progressives had been delighted, seeing within the Newsom of 2024 a counterweight to Trump that was just like that of the Newsom of 2019 and 2020. However then, in early January, wildfires swept by Los Angeles, burning the Pacific Palisades and Altadena communities to the bottom and complicating the state’s plans. In these swirling, wind-driven fires, all the things modified.
Newsom confronted a barrage of assaults from Trump, who took to calling him “Governor Newscum.” Trump and Musk added gas to the rhetorical flames. On-line, conspiracy theories circulated that LA Mayor Karen Bass and Newsom had one way or the other began the infernos to cowl up proof of tunnels used to move victims of pedophilia across the metropolis. Trump and Musk piled on to Newsom, accusing him and Bass of failing to organize for emergencies and of being delinquent in making certain enough water provides for firefighters. As an alternative of happening the offensive, as might need been his wont 5 years in the past, Newsom issued some gentle rebukes of those that would unfold Web rumors in the midst of a tragedy. Then he cordially invited Trump to LA to survey the fireplace harm, earlier than flying to DC to steer the president about how finest to get catastrophe reduction funds flowing to the beleaguered metropolis. Some liberal activists had been appalled. However one among Newsom’s aides stated that in 2025 the governor must decide his fights extra selectively than he had six years earlier. Certainly, within the months that adopted, Newsom shied away from the function of being a foil to Trump, as an alternative launching a podcast to attempt to straddle political divides, inviting alt-right influencers akin to Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon onto the present to debate points pricey to their hearts. And in late March, he threw punches at his personal get together, telling Invoice Maher that in some ways the Democratic model was “poisonous.” “We speak all the way down to folks,” Newsom stated. “We speak previous folks.”
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One of many governor’s aides stated that Newsom, a possible 2028 Democratic presidential hopeful, believed he may manipulate Trump extra successfully with a little bit of well-placed flattery than if he merely went at him with rhetorical hammers and tongs. Because of this, he has been comfortable to cede the highlight of California “resistance” to Legal professional Normal Rob Bonta and his authorized workforce. “The governor is unquestionably selecting his phrases rigorously,” Bonta stated. “He’s met with the president; he’s appropriately sought catastrophe funding,” and on the identical time he referred to as the particular legislative session to Trump-proof California. “So he’s engaged on two tracks.” In apply, what meaning is that Newsom is just sparingly utilizing his huge public platform to critique the president’s lawlessness.
Nonetheless, it’s an open query whether or not this technique of utilizing the Legislature and the state DOJ to battle Trump whereas Newsom maintains a cordial relationship with the president will probably be sufficient to allow California to face up to the sequence of political tornadoes that Trump is unleashing. If something, the overwhelming pace of the primary few months of Trump’s second time period has highlighted the elemental challenges of any Trump-proofing technique centered on litigation, which just about by definition works at a slower tempo than does Trump’s burn-it-all-down model of politics.
Everybody, together with Governor Newsom’s shut advisers, acknowledges that the stakes couldn’t be increased. With the federal authorities in disaster, American society is dealing with a far better stress take a look at than it skilled throughout Trump’s first time period. Certain, Newsom has stated that extremely expert staff fired by federal businesses can be welcomed into jobs in California state authorities. However even a state with the huge assets of California—it just lately bypassed Japan to develop into the fourth-largest economic system on earth—doesn’t have the power to backstop all the federal features which can be being eviscerated by the destruction in DC, which raises the disquieting query: If California, arguably the nation’s finest wager for a state resistance technique, is in the end pressured to bow to the Trumpian onslaught, what of in all places else?
Jason Elliott, a former deputy chief of workers to Governor Newsom who’s now a strategist with Versus Options, has concluded that Trump 2.0 will find yourself being a battle to the political demise between the forces of MAGA and the forces of liberalism in America, particularly these epitomized by California. “To ensure that the MAGA principle of the universe to carry water, California should fail,” Elliott says. But when California succeeds, “this numerous, progressive place the place folks can exist peaceably dwelling facet by facet, then the core tenet of the MAGA principle fails. We’re a state that doesn’t demonize different folks.”
A coalition of labor teams and activists maintain a Might Day rally in Los Angeles on Thursday, Might 1, 2025, for Worldwide Employees’ Day and to protest Trump’s insurance policies.(Sarah Reingewirtz / MediaNews Group / Los Angeles Every day Information by way of Getty Photos)
Following by on its mandate to make use of litigation to dam the administration’s illegal actions at each flip, Bonta’s workforce is a celebration to no less than 12 ongoing lawsuits towards Trump 2.0, as of early April. The workforce has been working with 22 different Democratic state attorneys common in crafting lawsuits to counter lots of Trump’s insurance policies. They’ve challenged Trump’s government order attacking birthright citizenship, the Workplace of Administration and Finances memo searching for to pause the distribution of $3 trillion in federal funds, DOGE’s entry to the Treasury Division’s fee system, and analysis funding cuts to NIH. Bonta’s workforce has additionally joined different state AGs in fits towards cuts to the Division of Schooling, efforts to claw again Covid funds from colleges, and makes an attempt to neutralize congressionally funded businesses such because the Minority Enterprise Growth Company and the Institute of Museum and Library Companies. And in late April, they introduced a lawsuit difficult Trump’s tariffs, which have already damage the state’s economic system and can doubtless do much more harm over the approaching months. The lawsuit argues that in imposing them with out congressional enter, Trump was overstepping the bounds of his authority.
Up to now, Bonta famous, with a number of exceptions the administration has largely abided by the short-term restraining orders issued in a number of of those circumstances, although he anxious which may change. “There’s plenty of foreshadowing—indications which can be very disturbing,” Bonta stated, whether or not it was JD Vance’s tweets concerning the illegitimacy of courtroom rulings or Trump’s open defiance within the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland father who was wrongly deported. The US Supreme Court docket ordered that the administration should facilitate Garcia’s return to the states, however there was no indication that Trump is complying with that order; certainly, Trump just lately acknowledged that he had the ability to carry Garcia house however was not going to take action. “The courts must do their job. And we’d go to courtroom, for instance, if there was a transparent order that was violated by the Trump administration, and we believed it was intentional, and we may show that intent,” Bonta stated. “We might search contempt-of-court orders from the judges.”
Given the uncertainty surrounding the courts and their means to carry administration officers to account, it’s tempting to see the Trumpian assault on due course of and American democracy as unstoppable, significantly within the wake of the workforce purges and cuts in funding for important applications. However Bonta was not shopping for it. “There’s been a story created that I don’t subscribe to round Trump being extra subtle and higher at imposing his agenda,” the state legal professional common argued. “And I haven’t seen it but. There’s been a better quantity of actions—many extra government orders, memos—so there’s way more to react to. However a lot of what he’s performed has, in my perspective, been sloppy, ham-handed, and simple to determine the illegality of it.”
Constitutional students in California appear to agree that within the early days of the administration, the divisions of energy between the federal authorities and the states had been nonetheless holding. One knowledgeable, who, like many in academia in the meanwhile, was reluctant to talk on the document for worry of drawing the administration’s wrath, defined that whereas the stability of energy between the chief and legislative branches was in danger on the federal degree, “The federal-state stability appears effective or regular proper now.” As long as that is still the case, he argued, California is in a great place to climate the storm.
Elliott, Newsom’s former deputy chief of workers, is assured that if the courts stay the ultimate arbiter, California will navigate this disaster efficiently and can handle to guard its folks and most of its signature insurance policies. However he, together with a rising variety of Democratic leaders and authorized students, additionally worries that the guardrails towards extralegal habits are shortly breaking down. Within the immigration realm particularly, the Trump administration appears to really feel emboldened to disregard the courts. If these guardrails do fail, then it’s on no account clear {that a} litigation-based technique will probably be sufficient to place the brakes on the MAGA-fication of America. In such a state of affairs, will probably be significantly essential for main blue-state governors akin to Newsom to forcefully spell out to the American public precisely what’s at stake. And, whereas Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has leaned into this function with gusto, thus far Newsom has chosen to go the low-key route.
Even with out going totally outdoors of the legislation, Trump 2.0 can do an entire heap of injury just by implementing enormous cuts to federal applications upon which all states, to 1 diploma or one other, rely. The truth is, in some ways it’s the existential menace to state budgets posed by the GOP’s efforts in Congress to intestine the social security web, relatively than Trump’s extra-constitutional actions, that represents the only greatest danger to California. The destiny of Trump’s “huge, stunning invoice”—which is predicted to fund the president’s coverage agenda whereas chopping funding for Medicaid, housing help, childcare, well being analysis, and different social spending—will probably be determined later this summer season. However California officers usually are not ready for a draft of the laws to plan their response.
As early as March, state businesses and officers, in addition to the highly effective California Federation of Labor Unions, had been on the lookout for methods to marshal California’s assets to fill the voids that might be left by the federal authorities’s abrupt withdrawal of funds and of partnerships in all the things from healthcare to schooling, from variety initiatives to the operating of science labs.
At a webinar organized by the American Federation of Academics in early February, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond was requested what California may do if the federal Division of Schooling is destroyed. “California must be able to backfill any providers which may be misplaced,” Thurmond stated. “You all ought to really feel good that our college students are coated for now. Our greatest protection is an efficient offense. And we’ll work laborious to forestall the DOE from closing.” Past the platitudes, Thurmond promised to push laborious for state legislators to lift taxes on rich Californians, who will profit mightily from the tax cuts that Congress seems poised to cross, in order to generate funds to guard schooling providers within the state. Related conversations are underway about how one can elevate revenues to avoid wasting California’s healthcare system.
Lorena Gonzalez, California Labor Federation’s president, has been eager about the function that unions, in addition to California’s internet of union-friendly labor legal guidelines, will play within the state within the coming years, because the Federal Division of Labor, OSHA, the Nationwide Labor Relations Board, and different regulatory establishments in DC that monitor labor and civil rights situations play a diminished function beneath Trump. “There’s plenty of schooling happening, plenty of reliance on collective bargaining,” she says. The Federation has been taking part in protests towards the privatization of primary public providers, such because the US Postal Service, in addition to giant demonstrations within the Central Valley group of Delano towards ICE raids on undocumented farm staff. It has distributed info criticizing the Trump administration’s defunding of California’s high-speed rail challenge. And it has performed a lead function in a “Kill the Cuts” marketing campaign to protest the slashing of science grants to universities and public well being programs.
Gonzalez argues that California has a robust sufficient package deal of pro-labor legal guidelines on the books that it will probably create a strong counternarrative to Trump’s. The state has, for instance, banned employers from requiring staff to attend anti-union conferences. It has a legislation permitting state legislative workers to unionize—in stark contrasts to Trump’s efforts to finish collective bargaining rights for federal staff. It has the very best minimal wage within the nation, and a legislation mandating sector-wide collective bargaining within the fast-food trade. And it has a unionization price about one and a half instances that of the US workforce as an entire.
All of this provides unions in California outsize clout. Because the Republicans advance their efforts to intestine Medicaid, Gonzalez believes that California and the Labor Federation will be capable of wage a well-liked “Fingers Off Medi-Cal marketing campaign” to guard the expansive California model of Medicaid, which offers healthcare not just for these eligible beneath federal pointers however a big proportion of the state’s undocumented inhabitants as properly. When the GOP comes for labor protections, she believes that California will be capable of present dwelling proof that defending staff is an efficient social funding.
Within the meantime, California Senate majority chief Lena Gonzalez’s workplace has heard reviews of areas that day laborers frequent being raided and of dozens of migrants merely being dumped over the border into Mexicali. Gonzalez’s workforce has additionally heard from colleges within the Central Valley that many college students have stopped attending lessons as a result of their households are so involved about immigration raids on college grounds—which is why the senator has made it a precedence to cross laws stopping college officers from cooperating with ICE.
For Angelica Salas, the chief director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles (CHIRLA)—most likely probably the most influential immigrants’ rights group within the state—the cat-and-mouse sport with ICE has taken on new urgency, significantly because the president invokes antiquated insurance policies just like the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport these he has deemed criminals, whether or not or not they really have dedicated any crimes, and calls for that each one immigrants over the age of 14 register with the federal government. CHIRLA has coordinated dozens of teams, together with commerce unions and church buildings, within the Los Angeles area to develop speedy response groups within the face of raids. Greater than 220 volunteers joined these groups between November and March. “We’re organizing our group to construct a very robust basis of each protection and sooner or later our optimistic imaginative and prescient of immigration,” Salas stated.
Protesters kind an “Impeach & Take away” human banner on Ocean Seaside throughout a protest towards President Donald Trump, in San Francisco, Saturday, April 19, 2025.(Stephen Lam / San Francisco Chronicle by way of Getty Photos)
All through Southern California, CHIRLA organizers are educating immigrants their authorized rights. They’re working with eligible residents to assist them full inexperienced card and citizenship purposes. And, most instantly, they’re making it clear that at any time when ICE raids neighborhoods, will probably be noticed, and filmed, by speedy response activists.
Within the month following Trump’s inauguration, Pedro Trujillo, the pinnacle of CHIRLA’s speedy response community, estimates that volunteers had been referred to as out to confirm roughly 60 reported ICE sightings in Los Angeles County. Many, it turned out, had been false alarms, all the things from utility automobiles to FEMA vans with DHS decals. “If there have been to be mass raids, the speedy response community would activate to supply help to group members,” Trujillo says. “Allow them to know their rights, make certain ICE aren’t being abusive. And if persons are detained, we’d supply them authorized counsel.”
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Whereas Newsom has taken a backseat within the anti-Trump resistance this go-round, on a regular basis Californians have continued to step up and fill the void. All through the late winter and spring, there have been giant protests in a single or one other locale on a near-daily foundation. Noisy demonstrations have popped up outdoors Tesla dealerships across the state. College students have engaged in highschool walkouts to protest Trump’s immigration insurance policies. And activists of all ages have shut down freeways close to LAX to protest the crackdown on the undocumented and on asylum seekers.
Californians’ grassroots pushback doesn’t simply contain protests, nevertheless. Largely beneath the radar, self-help and mutual support actions are selecting up steam, a few of them explicitly taking their cues from the work of the Black Panthers in Oakland and different cities greater than a half-century in the past. They’re trying to shut no less than a number of the hole left by the sudden removing of billions of {dollars} of federal support to states and cities, by ramping up their distribution of meals, well being care, and schooling assets in communities significantly laborious hit by the federal cuts. And, as they accomplish that, they’re holding political schooling periods explaining what’s going on and why this second is important.
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“How will we construct establishments which can be impartial; that aren’t reliant on the system in any manner?” asks Ahjamu Umi, sitting in a café within the Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento. Umi was raised by Black Panthers and has labored with a pan-Africanist motion, the All African Folks’s Revolutionary Get together, for greater than 4 a long time. “If (the federal authorities) is all dismantled in three weeks, then you definately didn’t actually have it within the first place; it’s not secure.” Umi’s group has been on the bottom in Oak Park for many years. “I’ve been doing this nearly 41 years, my whole grownup life,” he says, “And I’ve by no means seen it having extra potential than it does proper now. Increasingly more persons are being disaffected by what they see, and realizing they must take accountability for the society they need.”
5 miles to the west, within the adjoining metropolis of West Sacramento, an city farm has, in recent times, sprung up on riverfront land, protected by a raised levee, which is leased from the state by the Worldwide Rescue Committee—which acquired, till Trump put the axe to the refugee resettlement program, federal {dollars} to assist refugees start their new lives in the USA. On a few of these sandy-soiled acres, refugees from Afghanistan and elsewhere develop crops such because the gandana—an Afghan leek—strawberries, onions, okra, and loofah (a kind of gourd). The rest of the land is subleased out to teams akin to Seeds of Solidarity Farm, which works with undocumented immigrants, excluded from the social security web, who wish to develop their very own meals.
“It (permits) folks to begin to suppose proactively as an alternative of reactively in relation to social organizing,” says Natalia, who works as a volunteer with the farm.
The volunteers eat what meals they want, and so they distribute the remainder of the harvest in parks, at NorCal Resist places of work, and in meals pantries dotted round Sacramento. Every week they maintain instructional periods on farming and politics. Natalia says that the variety of volunteers working on the farm has risen after which risen once more within the months since Trump was elected, although she doesn’t have actual numbers. “We’re anticipating that may proceed, Natalia stated. “Folks actually wish to do one thing.”
This internet of resistance in California provides the state no less than a combating probability towards a number of the mayhem to come back. However will it’s sufficient with out Newsom making the choice to make use of his public platform to aggressively push again towards Trump’s merciless authoritarianism?
For Lorena Gonzalez, California is primed to wage this battle. “I don’t suppose that Trump will be capable of do all the things he fantasizes he’s going to do,” the labor federation president says. Even with Newsom’s relative silence in latest months, the folks of California usually are not backing down. “I refuse to have my power sapped by the pace with which they’re releasing their concepts, lots of that are going to be very unpopular,” stated Gonzalez. “They need us to develop into demoralized. And the extra we refuse to be, the tougher their agenda will probably be.”
Sasha Abramsky
Sasha Abramsky is The Nation’s Western correspondent. He’s the creator of a number of books, together with The American Manner of Poverty, The Home of Twenty Thousand Books, Little Marvel: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Feminine Sports activities Famous person, and most just lately Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Towards the Far-Proper Takeover of Small-City America. Observe him on Bluesky at @sashaabramsky.bsky.social.
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