Newsom’s rant about Europe’s careful response to Trump was pathetic | Opinion
Rather than govern California, Gavin Newsom flew to Switzerland this week to chide European leaders as “pathetic” in an expletive-laden rant about the continent’s response to President Donald Trump. How low can Newsom go?
No California governor, certainly not this one, has the standing to tell European nations how to comport themselves. The last thing the United States needs to do is to export its increasingly toxic brand of politics overseas. Yet that’s what Newsom is doing, and it’s backfiring.
Coming off his successful decapitation of Venezuela’s political leadership with the seizure of President Nicolás Maduro, Trump has now set his eyes on Greenland, raising tariffs on European nations who dare to disagree with him and setting off a crisis in international relations.
Newsom, meanwhile, is coming off his own heady international moment in November at an international climate change conference in Brazil, where the California governor was our nation’s highest ranking representative. Hoping for a repeat, the governor headed to Davos, Switzerland, where Europe’s highest officials had gathered for their own conference on governance and trade.
Getting attention the wrong way
In Davos, Newsom was destined to be a small blip on a radar screen of world heavyweights, with Trump sure to grab the attention upon his arrival. The only way the gathered press would care what a California governor would have to say is if it were pretty outrageous. And Newsom did not disappoint. Here is our governor, unfiltered.
“Wake up!” he said to reporters. “Where the hell has everybody been? Stop this bullshit diplomacy of sort of niceties, and somehow we’re all going to figure it out. Have some spine, some goddamn balls… The Europeans should decide for themselves what to do, but one thing they can’t do is what they’ve been doing. And they’ve been playing folks for fools, and it’s embarrassing. Just, I can’t take this complicity, people rolling over. I should have brought a bunch of knee pads for all the world leaders….I mean, it’s just pathetic. And I hope people understand how pathetic they look on the world stage.”
Newsom’s fiery rhetoric has a rightful place on an American political stage that has devolved into acrimony and chaos as Trump has consolidated power, sent federal law enforcement into large cities and seeks to control foreign lands in various hemispheres. It takes a unique orator to break through our noise long enough to resonate with a distracted public.
Newsom has that gift. Leading a state that the Trump administration has attacked in every way possible, from denying California disaster aid to withholding federal funds to universities, fury coming a governor is a perfectly rational in our domestic context.
Still, a continent of eloquence
But in Europe, Newsom’s rant is tone-deaf and dangerous.
Who knows what world we would be living in today if, say, the European Union had decided to match Trump dollar for dollar, tariff for tariff, and potentially tax ourselves more and more, straight into a global recession.
Is that the kind of spine Gavin Newsom has in mind? And if Newsom thinks Europe is pathetic, does he still want it as a vital trading partner?
Sometimes crude language is just that, and eloquence is the true dagger.
Without naming Trump but certainly rejecting Trump’s destabilizing presence in the world, Pope Leo said: “The remarks that are made about Europe also in interviews recently, I think are trying to break apart what I think needs to be a very important alliance today….”
For the world’s most important religious leader, one from Chicago, to defend Europe against the antics from his homeland, is thunderous.
“We do prefer respect to bullies,” French President Emmanuel Macron told fellow leaders in Davos. “We do prefer science to protest. And we do prefer rule of law to brutality.”
The measured but strong words coming from one European leader after another are such a tonic compared to the cage match mentality of American politics being practiced by Trump and Newsom.
Out of apparent desperation for attention, Newsom’s act in Davos was a huge misfire. He was disrespectful, off base and unhelpful. This is no way for a California governor to speak about the behavior of some of our most important allies when it comes to trade, social justice, climate change adaptation and democracy.
Newsom should have stayed home in Marin.