Gov. Gavin Newsom nursed a bottle of tequila in his mansion while Los Angeles burned in Palisades Fire — and pouted that President Trump was blaming him for the devastating blaze.
“I felt the weight of everything collapsing,” Newsom recently told Bloomberg Businessweek. “We’re just lost the election. I was watching Elon at peak Elon, Trump at peak Trump.”
Newsom had just returned home from a week visiting the still-burning ruins of Los Angeles — where fire hydrants had no water and citizens on the street accosted him with accusations, all as Trump himself raged on social media “NO MORE EXUSES.”
“He was getting absolutely massacred by everybody,” said Newsom’s good friend Doug Hendrickson, who joined the California governor for the pickled pity party in January.
“Like it was his fault, the whole thing. He was sort of a train wreck,” Hendrickson added.
It remains unclear if the pair pounded booze at the California governor’s mansion in Sacramento, or at Newsom’s $9 million mansion outside San Francisco in Marin County.
Newsom was very much in the line of fire at the time, with Trump — then President Elect — pouring on criticism for the city and state’s inability to put out the Palisades Fire, which would destroy 7,000 homes and businesses and kill 12 people before it was contained after about a month.
“The fires are still raging in LA. The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on January 12. “They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?”
In another post days earlier, Trump blamed Newsom for prioritizing an endangered fish over the people of LA and accused him of draining local reservoirs.
“He is the blame for this,” Trump wrote.
And Newsom claimed to Bloomberg that he was terrified of what was coming once Trump was sworn in on Jan. 20 — recalling how he’d been able to work with the president to fight another LA fire in 2018/
But he said then-president-elect Trump seemed determined only to attack him.
“I’m like, this is a different guy,” Newsom told Bloomberg.
However, the fires were one of the experiences that inspired Newsom to become one of Trump’s most vocal opponents in a Democratic party that’s floundered to make sense of itself since President Biden’s re-election campaign imploded, and Vice President Harris was quickly proved incapable of carrying the party’s standard into a new era.
Newsom seems to believe he’s the man to take on Republicans in 2028, and has ramped up attacks on Trump in recent months — notably trying to keep up with the president’s sophomoric tactics by blasting off outrageous all-caps tweets of his own on the governor’s official X account.
But Newsom, who was born to a wealthy and politically connected family, would have to contend with an image that both he and the tech-wealthy state of California have gained for West Coast elitism if he chooses to run — and its an image he thinks is unfair.
“I think there’s a California derangement syndrome,” he told Bloomberg. “It’s extraordinary, the bulls–t I hear about this state.”
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