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Democratic governors are scrambling to mount an effective opposition to the policies of the new administration. They may not be holding a winning hand.
Brian Cassella/TNS
The votes hadn’t all been counted in the presidential race before California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced he wanted to “Trump-proof” his state’s progressive policies. “The freedoms we hold dear in California are under attack — and we won’t sit idle,” he pledged.
Can Newsom and the other Democratic governors who have vowed to join him really Trump-proof their states? If they fail, would that mean a huge crack in the foundation of federalism? And if they succeed, just how united would the United States be?
The Democrats have been working on assembling a posse to ride against the agenda of President-elect Donald Trump. In California, Newsom issued a proclamation calling the Legislature back on Dec. 2 to work on a long list of Trump-proofing amendments. Meanwhile, Attorney General Rob Bonta has been cataloging more than 120 lawsuits that the state filed against the first Trump administration.
Newsom’s campaign predictably enraged Trump, who attacked him on Truth Social. “Governor Gavin Newscum [Trump’s favorite name for a favorite foe] is trying to KILL our Nation’s beautiful California,” he wrote, and pledged to fight California’s “INSANE POLICY DECISIONS.” To Trump, Newsom was the perfect foil, an icon for the Democrats he had campaigned against. The state, Trump said, was “a symbol of our nation’s decline,” a “crime-ridden” place that they’ve just let “go to hell.”
California policymakers have a long list of worries. Trump has threatened to freeze disaster relief money and waivers from Environmental Protection Agency regulations that allow the state to set zero-emission requirements (though Trump bro Elon Musk might well like the idea of moving more Californians into electric cars). The state is trying to win health-care waivers to allow it to put more money into Medicaid and reproductive health and to generate more revenue through its tax on managed-care organizations, and the Trump administration might not approve them. And then there’s a multibillion-dollar plan for a bullet train linking San Francisco and Los Angeles, which would be a juicy target for Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency.
Other governors have ridden into battle. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker says that if “you come for my people, you come through me.” In Massachusetts, Gov. Maura Healey has promised that the state’s law enforcement officials won’t be any part of Trump’s mass deportation plan. Phil Murphy, New Jersey’s governor, pledged to “fight to the death” if Trump comes up with policies contrary to the state’s values.
Meanwhile, Pritzker and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis announced the creation of a new group, Governors Safeguarding Democracy, dedicated to developing playbooks to protect “state-level institutions of democracy.” It was a bipartisan group, they said, although it started with only Democratic governors.
Not all Democratic governors have agreed on the pitched-battle strategy. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has deliberately stood back from Newsom’s confrontational approach and said she wanted to find “some shared priorities” with Trump. “We’ve worked with a Trump administration before,” she said, and thought they’d figure out how to do it again. Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor who nearly became Kamala Harris’ running mate, said— twice — in his post-election statement that he “wanted to get things done.”
It was no coincidence, of course, that both are popular governors from swing states that the Democrats didn’t carry in the 2024 election. Neither was it a coincidence that analysts have mentioned both as potential Democratic nominees in 2028, who might want to be cautious about the fights they pick.
So even as they launch the fight to Trump-proof their states, the Democrats certainly don’t have a solid blue wall.
Moreover, there’s a limit to how effectively they can resist Trump’s policies. If as president Trump decided to sit on disaster aid or refuse to approve waivers for environmental or health-care plans, Democratic governors could find themselves long on rhetoric but short on results.
And if the states decide to fight Trump in court, as California often did successfully in the first Trump administration, the battle will be much harder this time. The first time around, California successfully fought many of its judicial battles in the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Trump, however, named 10 of the 29 judges on the circuit. That means California will now have to pick its battles much more carefully, with an eye especially on which cases to file in which courts.
Fully Trump-proofing their states, therefore, is more than Democratic governors can accomplish. They can certainly throw sand into the gears of the Trump machine, to slow down his efforts — although it must be said that the president’s team can toss just as much (if not more) their way, to gum up the gears of state policy.
In fact, we might well see the most direct confrontation between federal and state power since the 1963 crisis when President John F. Kennedy ‘s deputy attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, challenged Gov. George Wallace over desegregating the University of Alabama. Wallace lost, but his loss helped spark the power shift that led to Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and his victory in the 1968 presidential race. Now, as then, it’s hard to predict how the longer-term politics will shake out.
The ”Trump-proofing” strategy could deepen the division between red and blue states. It could prove to be the battlefield where the first shots of the 2028 presidential campaign are fired. And it could be where the big questions of federalism for the next decade become defined.
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