Gavin Newsom Out-Trumps Trump With A 2028 POTUS Campaign Launch By Any Other Name To Fight GOP Gerrymandering

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13 hours ago

'Today is Liberation Day in the state of California,' Gavin Newsom proclaimed today in downtown L.A. of the legislative effort to stop Donald Trump from 'rigging the system' with gerrymandering and other blows against American democracy. 'I know they say don't mess with Texas, well don't mess with the great Golden State.'
'We've got to recognize the cards that have been dealt,' Newsom added in his new-ish Resistor-in-Chief role. 'We've got to meet fire with fire,' the governor went on to say, asking for a National Commission on redistricting. He also noted, to jeers, the presence of masked ICE and DHS agents outside the rally venue of the Democracy Center in downtown L.A.
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Seeking the backing of the legislature in Sacramento to level the electoral playing field after the GOP-ruled Lone Star state rewrote the rules to give Trump five new Congressional seats, Newsom is aiming for a Special Election on November 4 to give Democrats five more seats in California. On pause until the likes of Florida and Missouri make their own gerrymanderiing moves or not, Newsom's plan, if successful, would effectively blunt the increasingly very unpopular Trump's hopes of holding onto a majority in the House of Representatives.
The White House was a little too fast on the X trigger in its response from Communications Director Steven Cheung.
'We are not going to sit back passively …Donald Trump does not play fair,' Newsom said in a press conference he held right after his speech. Confident he'll get the 2/3 majority needed for the Election Rigging Response Act to pass the Legislature, the Governor promised the redistricting maps will be released soon. 'I imagine other states will consider their own path,' he said of other Blue States in the nation.
As promised, in Newsom's trolling of Trump on social media the past two weeks, the California governor's event was draped as an all-caps and more 'HISTORIC … BEAUTIFUL RALLY.'
'He knows his Presidency ends in 17 months,' the Governor said Thursday of Trump, who Democrats have already threatened with a third impeachment if they retake Congress. 'He's a failed president,' Newsom went on to lambaste Trump to cheers from the invited audience, repeating his frequent condemnation of the TACO POTUS as having 'weakness masquerading as strength.'
Taking questions today in the Oval Office before heading off to sit down tomorrow in Alaska with Vladimir Putin, who had to get a special dispensation to attend and not be arrested as a war criminal, Trump said that without his taking over the California National Guard and Marines earlier this year to quell protests against ruthless and often warrantless immigration raids earlier this summer, L.A. 'wouldn't be existent today.' Revealing his true priorities Trump added: 'We would have had to cancel the Olympics if I let that go on.'
'Other Blue states need to stand up,' Newsom declared at his own rally, with an eye perhaps to another election in 2028. Still fighting Trump in court over POTUS taking over putting the California National Guard on the streets of L.A., the term-limited Newsom has emerged as the de facto leader of the opposition in the absence of Barack Obama, Kamala Harris and others on the national stage.
In short, if Gavin Newsom is running for President, as many have assumed he will, today was also a campaign launch by any other name. Or to paraphrase Trump, as Sen. Adam Schiff did in his remarks, 'Donald Trump, thank you for your attention in this matter.'
Raising the bar on his social media platforms and front-facing postures since the New Year, Newsom has earned the nickname 'Newscum' from Trump and a clear personal vendetta where once the duo had a Cold War stance during the ex-Celebrity Apprentice host's first term.
More low-key in execution than the MAGA love-ins Trump flourishes in, Newsom's gathering slammed the violent ICE abductions rampaging through California and other Blue States, the dismissing of court orders, the bullying of institutions, attacks on the Constitution, the loss of Roe v. Wade, and, in the words of Lorena Gonzalez, head of the California AFL-CIO, the 'f*cking billionaires who are causing this problem in the first place.'
The point of Thursday's get together was to take action on the West Coast on the Election Rigging Response Act in reaction to gerrymandering efforts in Texas to redistrict in the hopes of maintaining or increasing GOP majority in the House of Representatives in next year's still scheduled midterms. However, Newsom and others were also full throated in their intent that California's measures will halt Trump's authoritarianism and attacks on democracy. To that, as to be expected, the Democrats' core issues of abortion rights, education, healthcare, LGBTQ+ rights, and more were also on the agenda. With an American flag center stage, in attendance were both of the Golden State's Senators, Schiff ('You don't poke the bear,' he told the crowd) and Padilla, various state reps, as well as the Democrats' core supporters of union chiefs, Planned Parenthood leaders and social justice advocates.
Streamed online, the reaction to Republican efforts to rig the 2024 elections with redistricting and the seven months of Trump's 'chaos,' as Senator Alex Padilla termed it, the gathering was covered live in part by MSNBC and Fox News, but ignored by CNN and the BBC for continued reporting on Trump's summit with Putin Friday in America's northern most state. The anti-gerrymandering assembly was absent also from the homepages of the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and The New York Times.
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