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The war of words between Gavin Newsom and Donald Trump amid the LA wildfires continues, with the former hitting back after the president-elect called him “Newscum.”
For context, Trump has taken aim at the California governor for his handling of the wildfires currently ravaging Los Angeles County. In a Truth Social post on Jan. 9, Trump addressed Newsom as “Newscum” and said he was “the blame for” the unfolding natural disaster. He also baselessly claimed that Newsom had failed to sign a water restoration declaration, and said the fires were the result of the state’s efforts to protect a nearly-extinct species of fish called smelt.
Now, Newsom is hitting back at Trump’s nickname (which is almost as weak as “Tampon Tim”), recalling in a recent press conference how the same name was given to him in seventh grade. “Newscum,” he said, “I remember the guy on Baltimore Avenue who called me ‘Newscum,’ I was in seventh grade.” The governor completed his thoughts — which offered a mic drop moment so intense you can still hear it ricochetting — by assuring that he “can handle” Trump’s taunts, and elaborated in an X post that, despite Trump’s efforts to the contrary, the LA natural disaster “isn’t about me.”
“It’s about the people we represent,” Newsom wrote, “and the aid they deserve.” It marks the most recent time that Newsom has called out Trump’s attempts to distract from the urgency of the disaster by creating politicized firestorms of his own. In response to Trump’s Truth Social post earlier this month, Newsom’s communications director, Izzy Gardon, said the governor is “focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need.” Later, Newsom himself said “this guy wants to politicize” the wildfires while “people are literally fleeing” and have “lost their lives.”
It’s not the first time the pair have gone toe-to-toe on this issue. In 2019, during that year’s California wildfires, Trump and Newsom again exchanged words on social media, with the latter saying Trump was “excused from this conversation” since he doesn’t “believe in climate change.” Of course, for some people, both Newsom and Trump have been on the receiving end of the blame game as citizens try to make sense of the current devastation.
For his part, Newsom was called out by reality star Kim Kardashian, who urged him to increase the pay earned by incarcerated firefighters battling the blaze, despite her family’s water usage being called into question. Newsom has predictably also caught the ire of far-right citizens who have called for him to resign while in the same breath still wishing for Canada to be a part of the US.
On the other end of the spectrum, Trump himself has been held responsible for the wildfires, with Two and a Half Men star Jon Cryer calling out his hypocrisy while calling to mind the 2016 wildfires in Tennessee. Meanwhile, for his part, The Young and the Restless star Eric Braeden described Trump as an “orange idiot” whose response to the LA wildfires has been “outrageous” and “very damaging.”
These criticisms follow a resurfaced clip of Trump during his presidential campaign, in which he seemed to be more concerned by the cost of wildfires than the human and environmental destruction that they cause. If there’s anything worthy of the ‘scum’ label, it’s that.