Gavin Newsom has clapped back hard on Donald Trump in the first major rumble of the new year between the would-be POTUS and the incumbent POTUS.
Translating basically to bring it on, the California governor wasted little time Tuesday morning taking up the 79-year-old former Apprentice host’s cognitive test challenge. The throwdown came after Trump mocked Newsom in a rambling speech at the Kennedy Center to Republican lawmakers.
Lacking any sense of irony, Trump bet that Newsom, whom he has anointed as the Democrats’ 2028 White House frontrunner even though the outgoing governor has yet to formally declare a bid, couldn’t pass a cognitive test. “We should give everybody these competency tests … I think every president and vice president should be forced to take cognitive exams,” POTUS said at one point in his 84-minute remarks today.
Taking swipes at ex-VP nominee Gov Tim Walz (D-MN) and ex-VP Kamala Harris (as well as telling his congressional minions he’ll be impeached if the Dems win the midterms), Trump kept going. “I don’t think Gavin could,” POTUS said of the Golden State governor passing a cognitive test. “He’s got a good line of crap, but other than that he couldn’t pass.”
Following his rapid-response M.O. honed over the past year, Newsom swung back from the California governor’s office’s official X feed.
In homage to Trump’s odd 2020 boast of nailing a sequence of words in a previous cognitive test, Newsom wrote: “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.” The governor added: “If you’re so confident, let’s do it. Name your time and place.”
The White House has not responded to Deadline’s request for comment on Newsom’s reaction.
However, Tuesday also found Trump announcing online, in caps and with his Newscum put-down, that the “Fraud Investigation of California has begun.”
What that probe is, who is conducting it (DOJ) or what it is about is unknown. If the White House is hoping to kneecap Newsom, who is term limited and has to leave office next year, the way they did Minnesota’s Walz, they might have another thing coming.
Unlike Walz, who dropped his race for a third term on Monday after revelations of a sprawling state Medicaid fraud scandal engulfed the would-be VP, the 58-year-old Newsom has played offense much more than defense against the MAGA administration since Trump returned to power on January 20, 2025. Which is why Newsom’s team’s reply to the corruption post that POTUS is a “deranged, habitual liar whose relationship with reality ended years ago” shouldn’t come as any surprise.
Even as a wave of potential successors line up among California Democrats and Republicans heading towards the June 2 statewide primary and then November’s midterms, Newsom isn’t going quietly during his remaining months in office.
After a year of wildfires, relief-funding battles, ICE raids, protests, troops in the streets and court cases, plus partisan redistricting, a slew of punishing funding cuts from DC and a new anti-mask law, the ambitious governor is scheduled to deliver his final State of the State address Thursday in Sacramento. Already a hot bet among deep-pocket Hollywood donors and others looking towards 2028, Newsom will likely have more to say about Trump — cognitive and all.