California Governor Gavin Newsom drew applause at the World Economic Forum in Davos Thursday with a heated denunciation of President Donald Trump — but also rejected the growing Davos consensus that Trump represents a permanent breach in the American-led global order.
Newsom spoke a day after Trump grudgingly backed off threats to seize Greenland, and two days after Canadian Prime Minister captivated the global forum by declaring that US allies needed to acknowledge a permanent “rupture” in the global systems and begin hedging their bets by deeper engagement with China.
“These relationships are in dormancy. They’re not dead,” Newsom told me in a Thursday morning interview. “I don’t use those binary terms. Don’t fall prey to that. That’s a bit hyperbolic.”
Newsom drew repeated applause from an audience in the Congress Center that included European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde for heated denunciations of Trump, who he painted as an anomalous figure who “will be remembered in years, not decades.” Newsom denounced “corruption and graft at a scale we’ve never seen in American history,” and waved red kneepads at CEOs and American politicians he painted as frightened and subservient.
“I respect what Carney did because he has courage of convictions. He stood up,” Newsom said. But he also lamented that Carney’s deal with Beijing would involve “introducing low cost, high quality electric vehicles, not made in Michigan or Detroit, but overseas, into Canada.
“It says everything you know about the recklessness of America’s foreign policy,” Newsom said. “It’s a remarkable thing to break down 80-plus years of alliances. It takes decades and decades to build trust in organisations …. It takes weeks, tweets, hours, minutes, sometimes to destroy it.”