President Donald Trump used Friday night's White House Correspondents' Association Dinner to train sustained fire on California Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Vice President Kamala Harris, turning the state's two most prominent Democrats into the evening's recurring punchline.
The Newsom-Harris volley
Trump opened by targeting Newsom's reported 2028 presidential ambitions. 'Gavin Newsom has come out and said he will not be running for president, because nobody can say what he said about himself and survive,' the president said. The follow-up landed harder: 'Newsom was in big trouble when he openly admitted that Kamala was smarter than him. If Kamala is smarter than someone, you don't want that person to be President of the United States of America.'
The line carries electoral context. New polling shows Harris holds a significant advantage over Newsom and the rest of the Democratic field, leading by comfortable margins across the 14 most recent major polls — making the quip less purely comic than it might appear.
Wildfires and California policy
Trump also went after Newsom's record on the state's devastating wildfires. Riffing on the governor's reported comment that the country must 'fight fire with fire,' Trump said: 'There's only one thing we know about Gavin, and that's that he definitely doesn't want to fight fire with water.'
The president then catalogued what he called California's policy failures — 'enabling wildfires, paying drug addicts to be homeless, giving free sex changes to illegals' — before closing on the state's proposed billionaire tax, set to appear on the November ballot. 'People are fleeing, they're fleeing in droves and we can't have that in this country,' Trump said.
Newsom's office fires back
Newsom's office responded in real time, posting messages on social media that called Trump 'a son of a b—h' and 'a pig,' and sharing an AI-generated image of Trump looking in a mirror. A fourth post read: 'Trump is cracking jokes about natural disasters while American families are still waiting for the disaster recovery dollars he promised.'
The wider room
Trump did not limit his material to California. He called the correspondents' dinner crowd 'the largest group of Trump derangement syndrome people ever put together at one time.' He also referenced last month's cage fight outside the Oval Office to take a shot at former President Joe Biden, and suggested Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should face 'a rematch against an extremely simple question on foreign policy from the Munich Security Conference,' a reference to her widely criticized appearance at that event. The dinner was the first since April's event was disrupted by an assassination attempt on the president.
CEO Times take
The exchange crystallized a dynamic that will define the next three years: a Democratic Party still sorting out whether its future runs through Sacramento or through Harris's early polling lead, while California's own policy record — runaway homelessness, wildfire mismanagement and a proposed wealth tax that is already accelerating capital flight — hands the opposition ready-made material. Free enterprise and property rights don't thrive where the government's answer to every problem is a new levy or a new mandate. The market, and California's departing residents, have already voted on that proposition.
