“We Won’t Sit Idle”: California Governor Announces Plan to Fight Trump

California Governor Gavin Newsom has called a special session in the Golden State’s legislature to protect the state’s liberal policies from a Donald Trump presidency.

In a statement Thursday, Newsom warned, “The freedoms we hold dear in California are under attack—and we won’t sit idle.

“California has faced this challenge before, and we know how to respond. We are prepared to fight in the courts, and we will do everything necessary to ensure Californians have the support and resources they need to thrive,” the statement read. Newsom’s office also told the Associated Press the governor and legislators were ready to “Trump-proof” California’s state laws.

Newsom’s statement asked the legislature to give more funding to the state attorney general’s office to fight any federal challenges when it meets in December. California has a lot to safeguard: The state has many laws in place to protect abortion access, including budgeting $20 million to pay for people in other states to come to California for an abortion. The state has also mandated that every new car, pickup truck, or SUV sold in California be electric, hydrogen-powered, or plug-in hybrid by 2035.

During Trump’s first term, the state filed more than 120 lawsuits, and Newsom is preparing for another four years of legal battles, especially with conservatives eyeing anti-climate and anti-abortion measures. Newsom is not alone: Other leaders in Democratic states are also taking measures to safeguard their laws.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul said she and Attorney General Letitia James will be meeting to discuss how to legally protect “key areas that are most likely to face threats from the Trump administration.” These include “reproductive rights, civil rights, immigration, gun safety, labor rights, LGBTQ rights, and our environmental justice.”

Newsom may have good intentions, but he also has bigger ambitions than California and may have eyes on the presidency after Trump’s term is up. Proving himself as a bulwark against the Trump White House would do a lot to improve his national standing. The question is whether Newsom is taking these actions for real or for show, and whether the state’s measures will be effective.

Independent Senator Bernie Sanders’s scathing take on the Democratic Party’s election night losses seriously irked party leaders already licking their wounds.

In a statement Wednesday, the senator from Vermont offered his two cents on the sweeping defeat:

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.

Sanders cited inflation, historically low wages, artificial intelligence, exorbitant prescription drug prices, billions of dollars toward Israel’s “horrific” war on Palestine, and rampant corporate corruption all as issues that the Democratic Party did not adequately communicate to voters, or address at all.

Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison—previously an aide to Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina and then a corporate lobbyist—called Sanders’s take “straight up BS.” 

“Biden was the most-pro worker President of my life time—saved Union pensions, created millions of good paying jobs and even marched in a picket line and some of [Kamala Harris’s] plans would have fundamentally transformed the quality of life and closed the racial wealth gap for working people across this country,” Harrison tweeted Thursday morning.

“From the child tax credits, to 25k for a down payment for a house to Medicare covering the cost of senior health care in their homes. There are a lot of post election takes and this one ain’t a good one.”

Regardless of the merits of Harrison’s defense, there is a clear disconnect between the Democratic Party and the huge swaths of working-class voters who soundly rejected their platform this election cycle. Does it really matter that President Biden stood on one picket line when 67 percent of voters nationwide said the economy has been bad for them under his leadership? 

Biden and Harris, even with policies that help working-class people, still had to defend a status quo that, economically, actually wasn’t great for working-class people regardless of race. That’s a difficult position to be in when your opponent is running on upending said status quo.

Members of Team Biden have anonymously spilled that they wish Vice President Kamala Harris had continued to campaign on the dangers of corporate greed and corruption to counteract her weaknesses on inflation and the economy. According to The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer, a Biden aide told him that the vice president “steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer.” Harris mostly abandoned this angle and instead started campaigning more with billionaire Mark Cuban.  

Whether you think Sanders is right on this or not, it’s clear that it’s time for the Democratic Party to seriously reevaluate its messaging and win back the voters it used to always have.

The immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidential election win is already a bad omen for women and minorities across the nation, who within less than 48 hours have found themselves the subjects of hate campaigns designed to belittle and marginalize them.

“Your body, my choice. Forever,” posted white supremacist, Hitler fan, and far-right political pundit Nick Fuentes hours before the race had even been called in Trump’s favor.

On X (formerly Twitter), supporters of the “grab ’em by the pussy” rapist, convicted adulterer, Jeffrey Epstein confidant, and proud abortion rights destroyer reveled in their own threats against women, openly celebrating what they described as an onslaught of rape on the horizon.

“Women threatening sex strikes like LMAO as if you have a say,” wrote streamer Jon Miller, who later noted that he had successfully removed a community note from the viral post, allowing him to “profit from it.”

A text campaign—and obvious hate crime—issued a threat to students of color across the nation, claiming the recipients had been “selected” as “house slaves” and were due to appear at plantations.

One message shared online demanded that its recipient appear at Abingdon Plantation.

“This is mandatory,” the message read. “Sincerely, Trump administration.”

Another iteration of the campaign reportedly targeted Black public school students at South Western High School in Pennsylvania, which the principal described in a notice to parents as part of a “nationwide spread of AI generated text messages.”

But not all of the vitriol took place online. Activists celebrating Trump’s win overtook Texas State University at the school’s San Marcos campus, raising signs that read, “Women are property,” “Homo sex is sin,” and lists that designated women and slaves under “Types of Property.”

Meanwhile, American women in digital spaces spent the hours since Trump’s win musing about joining South Korea’s 4B movement as a counterprotest to the developing infringements on their personal autonomy. The guidelines of the voluntary movement involve saying “no” to dating or marrying men, having sex with them, and giving birth.

Rudy Giuliani tried out a new legal defense on Thursday, arguing in a Manhattan courthouse that he couldn’t possibly hand over his assets to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, a pair of 2020 Georgia poll workers whom he had repeatedly defamed, because he simply didn’t know where they were.

At a hearing, U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman said that the idea that neither Giuliani nor anyone else in the world has knowledge about where his assets are was “farcical,” reported Reuters.

“If he doesn’t comply, then I’m sure that I’m going to get a motion for contempt,” Liman said. “He’s not going to be in contempt if he’s made efforts and it’s impossible to comply with the order, but that’s the standard that he’s going to be held to.”

Aaron Nathan, an attorney for Freeman and Moss, also noted that it appeared Giuliani had been shuffling his assets around, opening new bank accounts and creating limited liability companies.

“It’s troubling that we learned about it on Monday for the first time,” Nathan said.

Those assets would include Giuliani’s Mercedes convertible, which he was seen driving in Florida on Election Day, making it a little difficult to argue he doesn’t know where it is.

Another asset is his Manhattan penthouse, a famously immovable object, which Giuliani was ordered to hand over within seven days to the mother-daughter duo. The lofty apartment would have partially satisfied the nearly $150 million in damages that the disbarred attorney was supposed to cough up after losing his defamation case.

Giuliani’s attorneys also argued that Freeman and Moss were being “vindictive” in repossessing certain kinds of assets, including a watch that was once owned by Giuliani’s grandfather.

“Oh come on, that’s ridiculous,” Liman said, adding that it didn’t matter if the former mayor of New York considered the watch an heirloom. “The law is the law.”

Amazingly, the $148 million debt is just the tip of the iceberg for Giuliani’s legal woes. Over the past year, the former Trump attorney unsuccessfully filed for bankruptcy, lost his accountant over his insurmountable debts, begged Donald Trump for help settling his seven-figure legal fees (he refused), had his WABC radio show canceled for spewing 2020 election lies, and miserably started his own coffee brand, “Rudy Coffee,” in an effort to funnel in some extra cash. He ultimately lost his bankruptcy case due to his outlandish spending habits, with the presiding New York judge branding the former city mayor a “recalcitrant debtor.”

Giuliani is also under the gun for a lawsuit from his former legal representation, who accused him of failing to pay his bill and allegedly only dishing out $214,000 of nearly $1.6 million in legal expenses. Giuliani, meanwhile, claimed he was stiffed by his favorite client, Trump, to the tune of millions of dollars.

But wait, there’s more: The MAGA henchman is also one of 19 co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case and was named in April in an Arizona indictment charging another slew of Republican officials and Trump allies for their alleged involvement in a scheme to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results. In October, an Arizona judge torched a legal filing Giuliani made in the case, ruling that the ex–Trump aide had “not one scintilla” of evidence to question the legitimacy of a grand jury assigned to his lawsuit.

But if the ex–Trump attorney can drag out his legal woes for long enough to obtain a pardon from Trump during the MAGA leader’s forthcoming second administration, he may not have to pay up at all.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer may finally get his greatest wish: to weaponize the federal government against Donald Trump’s political enemies.  

In an interview on Newsmax’s National Report Thursday, Comer was asked whether he planned to pursue further charges against Hunter Biden in the wake of Trump’s election victory. 

“We’re gonna see what the new Trump Department of Justice wants to do. I fully expect Joe Biden to pardon his son,” Comer said. “I think the most important thing for me, honestly, is that we hold people in the government accountable.”

“And I’m pretty optimistic that with this new administration that we can finally start holding some Deep State actors accountable for bad behavior,” he added. 

Comer has alleged that his investigations into the Bidens uncovered that the president’s family had been “selling access” to foreign adversaries of the United States.

After conducting a disastrous impeachment inquiry that failed to scrounge up even the slightest bit of evidence that Joe Biden had committed any wrongdoing, Comer, alongside other GOP House committee chairs, made criminal referrals to the Justice Department in June for Hunter Biden and Jim Biden, the president’s brother. 

After Hunter was found guilty on three felony gun charges that same month in a separate case, Comer said it was only a “step toward accountability.” 

“Until the Department of Justice investigates everyone involved in the Bidens’ corrupt influence peddling schemes that generated over $18 million in foreign payments to the Biden family, it will be clear department officials continue to cover for the Big Guy, Joe Biden,” Comer said.

At the time, even GOP lawmakers were saying that Comer had yet to dig up any evidence the president had committed a crime or impeachable offense. 

In August, several GOP-led House committees published a lengthy report claiming that Hunter and James Biden, and their associates, had raked in more than $27 million from foreign individuals or entities since 2014. It also alleged that Joe Biden had used his position as vice president to leverage more than $8 million in loans from Democratic donors. 

Oversight Committee Democrats responded, saying that the report was based on “vague, unsubstantiated, and thoroughly debunked allegations.”

Notably missing from the nearly 300 pages of the report was any evidence that Joe Biden himself had benefited from business dealings, or participated in any foreign business deals.

Now that Trump is headed back to the White House and is set to install his own attorney general, it looks like Comer may get the shot at Hunter Biden he’s been dreaming of for months. 

New York’s Democrats have finally made a comeback, two years after their disastrous performances in the 2022 midterm elections that helped cost their party the House of Representatives.

Democrats flipped three Republican seats, and no Democrats lost their seats, leaving the split at 19 Democrats and seven Republicans.

Democrat Josh Riley beat Republican Representative Marc Molinaro, who recently pivoted from a pragmatic brand of conservatism to full-on MAGA, with 51.8 percent of the vote at 96 percent reporting in a rematch from the 2022 midterms.

Democratic State Senator John Mannion beat Representative Brandon Williams with 53.9 percent of the vote at 84 percent reporting, flipping New York’s 22nd congressional district from red to blue. Williams took the seat in 2022, after after former Representative John Katko, a more moderate Republican, announced his retirement.

Laura Gillen beat Representative Anthony D’Esposito Thursday, with 50.9 percent of the vote at 98 percent reporting. D’Esposito’s campaign was marred by a damning report that he gave jobs in his office to his former lover and his fiancée’s daughter.

Cook Political Report had updated its rating of D’Esposito’s race just four days ahead of the election, shifting its prediction from “toss up” to “lean Democrat,” signaling that D’Esposito would likely lose his seat.

At the same time, Democratic lawmakers were able to defend their House seats in races against strong Republican challengers. Democratic Representative Tom Suozzi held his ground against GOP challenger Mike LiPetri, leading him by 51.3 percent to 48.7 percent with 97 percent reporting. Suozzi won the special House election in New York’s 3rd congressional district after the ouster of George Santos, flipping the Long Island and Queens–based district from red to blue.

Still, many Republicans were able to fend off challenges from Democrats.

In New York’s 17th congressional district, Representative Mike Lawler crushed a challenge from former Representative Mondaire Jones, earning a whopping 57 percent of the vote with 94 percent reporting. Jones’s already struggling campaign was further weakened by a spoiler candidate that left the Working Families Party campaigning against itself.

In Long Island, Republican Representative Nick LaLota defeated former CNN commentator John Avalon with 55.7 percent of the vote with 88 percent reporting.

Republican Representatives Nicole Malliotakis, Elise Stefanik, Andrew Garabino, Nicholas Langworthy, and Claudia Tenney were also able to maintain their seats.

With Republicans winning both the presidency and the Senate, it’s become clear that every Democratic House seat matters. Even with many House races yet to be called, it currently looks like there will be a Republican majority in the House.

In 2022, the ascensions of Molinaro and Lawler in the Hudson Valley, D’Esposito and LaLota on Long Island, and Williams in central New York were credited with losing the Democratic Party’s slim majority in the House.

That widespread failure came as an unhappy surprise for Democrats, especially considering that in New York state, there are nearly twice as many active registered Democrats as Republicans, indicating a significantly depressed turnout among Democratic voters for the 2022 midterm elections. In 2023, there were roughly 5.9 million active Democrats and only 2.7 million Republicans.

The rich are already adding to their wealth after Donald Trump’s election.

According to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, the world’s 10 richest people got even richer on Wednesday, collectively adding $64 billion to their coffers on the day Trump captured the presidency for the second time. It’s the biggest one-day increase since Bloomberg set up the index in 2012.

The increase came from a big day on the stock market, which rallied in the hopes that Trump will decrease regulations and lower taxes. The S&P 500 had a 2.5 percent increase, the best-ever performance following an election, and the U.S. dollar also went up. The world’s richest man, Trump supporter Elon Musk, saw his net worth go up by a whopping $26.5 billion, helped by a big jump in Tesla’s stock price.

Behind Musk, Jeff Bezos’s net worth went up by $7.14 billion. Bezos infamously decided that his newspaper, The Washington Post, should refrain from making a presidential endorsement this election, and he congratulated Trump on his “extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory” in an X post soon after the news of Trump’s win broke.

The Republican Party has always counted business leaders and executives among its main backers, and that hasn’t changed with the rise of Trump. Trump, as a business executive himself, shares their aims of fewer taxes and regulations. Naturally, this means that these executives and their companies see a chance for more profits with a new Trump administration.

Many of these plutocrats made their money from tech companies and Silicon Valley, where executives like Musk think of themselves as exceptional and see Trump as someone who will protect their wealth and status. They’ll see their gains from the past day as proof that they made the right decision, even if they foresee a future financial crisis from Trump’s agenda.

Trump’s flawed plans to institute tariffs also promise to make the rich even richer, despite the fact that prices will go up for many goods and services. However, economic metrics show that those tariffs would destroy the economy and send inflation skyrocketing. So while many billionaires today are toasting their immediate gains, tomorrow they may be lamenting what Trump has done. Historically, when business leaders have backed a fascist autocrat, it has ended up backfiring on them.

The most stubborn man in the Senate is rumored to be in the running for secretary of transportation.

Alabama Republican and former college football coach Tommy Tuberville’s name was mentioned for the Cabinet position. In response, Tuberville’s office told Reuters, “If there was a position where he could be more impactful for both Alabama and the country he would listen, but he believes that President Trump needs a sledgehammer in the Senate and right now he is focused on playing that role.”

But Tuberville has been more of a blockade than a sledgehammer during his Senate tenure. Tuberville spent nearly all of 2023 inexplicably and single-handedly blocking more than 450 military promotions, leading to widespread chaos within the U.S. military. He justified this blockade by stating that he was protesting the Pentagon’s abortion policy, which allows service members to be reimbursed if they are forced to leave their state of deployment to access an abortion. Tuberville was lambasted by Democrats and Republicans alike and eventually dropped his protest last December, leaving the policy in place and his colleagues incensed.

Tuberville has also refused to acknowledge that white nationalists are indeed racist, stating that the definition of white nationalism is a matter of personal opinion. His co-workers said he wasn’t racist, just very stupid.

“I do not believe that Tommy Tuberville is a racist at all,” an anonymous senator said. “I really believe that maybe he doesn’t have an understanding of the English language.”

These are not encouraging words regarding our potential secretary of transportation.

Donald Trump already has a handful of potential Cabinet picks in mind for his second administration—and they couldn’t be more alarming.

For White House chief of staff, the MAGA leader is reportedly considering either Susie Wiles, his top campaign adviser, or Brooke Rollins, president of the far-right America First Policy Institute, according to Trump allies that spoke with The Washington Post.

Other options for top positions include either billionaire hedge fund investor John Paulson or economic adviser Scott Bessent for Treasury secretary, and a toss-up between former Trump staffer Ric Grenell and Senator Marco Rubio for secretary of state.

But people who had previously worked alongside these candidates had their qualms about Trump’s choices.

Grenell, who was roundly criticized for his inexperience while serving as Trump’s acting director of national intelligence for a handful of months in 2020, is reportedly also in the running for other top intelligence positions, including heading the Central Intelligence Agency in order to unearth the secrets of the “deep state,” according to RawStory.

“Everyone knows he has no qualifications for this job,” Mark Groombridge, who worked closely with Grenell at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, told Foreign Policy upon Grenell’s ascension to the coveted Cabinet position in 2020. According to Groombridge, Grenell had “many talents,” but the job’s requirements—such as impartiality—“don’t comport with that skill set at all.”

Upon hearing the news that Grenell had a pathway toward becoming CIA director, at least one former FBI agent lamented to her followers on X: “God help us.”

Trump has also thrown around other names for potential roles in his administration, including suggesting that renowned anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would have free rein over the nation’s health policies. World’s richest man Elon Musk has already agreed to head up a new department under the Trump admin—the Department of Government Efficiency, otherwise known as “DOGE”—which will focus on slashing government spending.

If Musk is to be believed, he’ll be looking to cut more than $2 trillion in federal spending—more than the country’s entire discretionary spending budget, which funds the military, national defense, as well as allocations for other federal agencies. The tech billionaire has also promised to launch a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government.”

Trump’s campaign had reportedly scoured thousands of potential names but refused to disclose them ahead of the election due to Trump’s own superstitions. The picks largely come at the recommendation of the soon-to-be 47th president’s allies, who have claimed that incoming staffers would be given their positions based on their devotion to Trump’s vision for America—and to Trump himself, placing a premium on loyalty above all other skills, qualifications, or attributes.

In an interview with the Financial Times last month, Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick lamented that Trump’s last administration buckled under the weight of staff turnover due to disagreements in “vision,” promising that a second Trump term would focus on eradicating any internal hostility to the Republican’s plans.

Elon Musk’s daughter announced that she will be leaving the country after Donald Trump’s election night victory. Vivian Jenna Wilson, who is transgender, spoke out against President-elect Trump and her father, who played a pivotal role in helping him retake the White House. 

“I’ve thought this for a while, but yesterday confirmed it for me. I don’t see my future being in the United States,” Wilson said on Threads Wednesday evening. “Even if he’s only in office for 4 years, even if the anti-trans regulations magically don’t happen, the people who willingly voted this in are not going anywhere anytime soon.”

Wilson has notably been estranged from her father since 2022, and has accused him of transphobia, “cruelty,” and “serial” cheating. She said Musk would berate her for being more in touch with femininity as a child, urging her to make her voice deeper.

“I was in fourth grade. We went on this road trip that I didn’t know was actually just an advertisement for one of the cars—I don’t remember which one—and he was constantly yelling at me viciously because my voice was too high,” she told NBC in July. “It was cruel.” 

Musk’s comments toward his daughter only bolster these accusations. He has repeatedly deadnamed Wilson, meaning that he calls her by her male, birth name rather than recognizing the full and independent trans person that she is. In an interview with right-wing pseudo-intellectual Jordan Peterson, Musk stated that “I lost my son, essentially.… My son Xavier is dead, killed by the woke mind virus … so I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that.” Musk has also referred to his daughter as a “full communist” who thinks that “anyone rich is evil.” Musk is the richest man in the world. 

The billionaire has been Trump’s most enthusiastic surrogate this election cycle, following him from state to state and donating $119 million to Donald Trump’s America PAC.* He is sure to have a significant position, official or otherwise, in a Trump Cabinet chiefly concerned with demolishing transgender rights. America’s most powerful civilian is leading us toward a grim future that his oldest child knows all too well.   

“I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form,” Wilson told a court in 2022.

* This post previously misstated the amount donated.