Gov. Gavin Newsom of California was denied entry to an American venue at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and his scheduled speaking engagement there was abruptly canceled on Wednesday, a spokesman for the governor said.
Mr. Newsom, a Democrat and vocal Trump critic, had been scheduled to speak at a one-on-one “fireside chat” with an editor for the media outlet Fortune on Wednesday evening at USA House, the spokesman, Izzy Gardon, said. California’s economy, on its own, is the fourth largest in the world.
But the governor’s team was turned away when it arrived for a security check a few hours before the event, Mr. Gardon said, and then told that “a venue-level decision” had been made to “not include an elected U.S. official” in the evening’s program.
On social media, Mr. Newsom criticized the decision. “How weak and pathetic do you have to be to be this scared of a fireside chat?” he wrote.
A White House spokeswoman, Anna Kelly, did not answer a question about whether Mr. Newsom had been prohibited from entering the USA House at Davos, and referred to the governor using an insulting misstatement of his name that has been frequently used by Mr. Trump.
“No one in Davos knows who third-rate governor Newscum is or why he is frolicking around Switzerland instead of fixing the many problems he created in California,” she said.
The incident came after Mr. Newsom on Tuesday compared the president to a Tyrannosaurus rex and called on European powers to stand up to the administration. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent responded, in a speech early Wednesday, by calling Mr. Newsom “smug,” “self-absorbed” and “economically illiterate,” and referring derisively to his planned appearance.
Mr. Trump also used his own speech on Wednesday to respond, describing Mr. Newsom as someone he “used to get along so great with.” Afterward, Mr. Newsom dismissed the president’s address on social media as “boring.”
It is not clear if the Trump administration was responsible for cutting off Mr. Newsom’s access. USA House has corporate sponsors, but Mr. Gardon noted that the U.S. government was an official partner at the venue. In a brief phone interview, Alyson Shontell, the editor in chief of Fortune, the venue’s official media partner, said that Fortune “had no part” in the decision to cancel the appearance and had no other comment.
“It was made clear there was pressure from the top,” Mr. Gardon said.
Mr. Gardon said that an appearance by Mr. Newsom on Thursday, at a different location controlled by the World Economic Forum, had not been canceled.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting from Davos, Switzerland.
Shawn Hubler is The Times’s Los Angeles bureau chief, reporting on the news, trends and personalities of Southern California.
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