By Francesca Maglione, Bloomberg
It was the night before Donald Trump was set to dispatch federal troops to Los Angeles, and Gavin Newsom was on the phone with the US president.
The subject of their conversation was anything but the military deployment.
“Whaddya think about Newscum? It’s pretty good, isn’t it?” the California governor recalled Trump asking him, referring to the nickname the president had coined. Newsom said he replied: “Well, it’s not really original. There was literally a guy in seventh grade on Baltimore Street who used to call me that.”
The tete-a-tete offers a window into the idiosyncratic relationship between Newsom and Trump. Even though they’re on different sides of the political aisle and constantly trade barbs, the two men are also at times curiously jovial.
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Earlier this month at Davos, Trump couldn’t help but acknowledge his rival during his speech after Newsom was spotted watching it leaning against a wall.
“Gavin’s a good guy,” Trump declared.
The president has suggested that friendly exchanges are typical of politics. He said this week that many politicians are nice to him in private before blasting him publicly.
“I do the same to them — I’m nice to them and then I’m not so nice maybe when I’m talking about them as a politician,” he told WABC regarding New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who visited the Oval Office for a surprisingly warm meeting last year. “But you know, it’s politics. It’s a nasty world.”
Few politicians, however, have publicly goaded Trump as much as Newsom, who is in his final year as governor and is seen as a likely contender in the 2028 presidential race. Over the past year, he has sought to cast himself as a Democratic counterweight to the Republican leader. He has even taken to mocking Trump by mimicking the president’s brash Truth Social posts.
The governor has also departed from his party’s progressive wing on some issues, saying last year that allowing transgender athletes to compete in girls’ sporting events may raise fairness concerns. More recently, he has warned that a one-time tax on billionaires proposed by populist Democrats will backfire by prompting the ultrarich to leave California.
Newsom has said that he and Trump had a good relationship in the past. But the governor’s public stance quickly changed after the LA protests in June.
Trump deployed 4,000 National Guard soldiers and 700 active-duty Marines to the area, saying they were needed quell unrest in the city as demonstrators protested the president’s immigration policy. Newsom sued over the response, claiming it overstepped authority and inflamed the situation.
To the governor, there was little indication of what was coming the night before the troops arrived.
“I was smiling the whole time, again trying to bring up LA,” Newsom said of the phone call with Trump. But Trump had “no interest in LA.”
When informed that the “Newscum” nickname wasn’t original, Newsom said Trump countered with: “Well, yeah, but how about MAGA?”
The governor replied that while that was “pretty good,” it wasn’t original either. At that point, Trump pivoted to talking about the number of hats he had sold, Newsom said.
“It’s not amazing to me that we had that interaction,” Newsom said at the Bloomberg event. “It should amaze all of you that the president of the United States operates as he does.”
–With assistance from Romy Varghese and Justin Sink.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2026 Bloomberg L.P.
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