California Governor Gavin Newsom continues to polish his White House bona fides, this time with an appearance in Brazil, host of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, aka COP30.
Speaking Monday at the Milken Institute’s Global Investors’ Symposium in São Paulo, Newsom paused Broadway theater–like to blast the Trump administration for refusing to send any U.S. official to COP30 — and then begged forgiveness.
“I apologize for being so partisan here,” Newsom said. “I literally came out here. I’m just stunned. I got four kids. The hell is going on in my country now? Not one person from the [Trump] administration showed any respect. For any of you. Forget politics, disrespect.”
Newsom frequently calls Trump an authoritarian. So you might think it strange that he so profoundly admires China’s Xi Jinping.
“China gets it,” he told Milken attendees. “America is toast competitively, if we don’t wake up to what the hell they’re doing in this space — on supply chains, how they’re dominating manufacturing, how they’re flooding the zone here, EU, elsewhere, Africa.”
In fact, Newsom’s diplomatic cosplay on the global stage — and his obsequiousness around Xi — is the real threat to American national security. Throughout his seven years in the Governor’s Mansion, Newsom has destroyed California’s once-productive energy sector, betting everything on what he calls “clean energy.” As I wrote in National Review a few months ago (with a big shout-out to the unsurpassable work of NR alum Jimmy Quinn):
Believing he can use his executive authority in one state to halt climate changes all over the globe, Newsom has accelerated the destruction of California’s once-immense oil industry. He has fenced in the production and retail sale of gasoline with regulations that have driven up the price of fuel to the highest in the nation — and then, displaying a remarkable Hollywood talent for mimicking outrage, called a special session of the legislature to consider how to punish Big Oil for the outcome. He has bet California’s future on technology that doesn’t exist or that requires rare minerals over which China has a near monopoly, including graphite, the key component in electric vehicle batteries, and other minerals used in the production of semiconductors and munitions. Once a global energy producer, California is now utterly dependent on imported foreign oil and Chinese strategic interests.