California Gov. Gavin Newsom slammed Donald Trump as a “stone-cold liar” in an MSNBC interview on Sunday, insisting the president’s angry public posturing doesn’t match the tone he struck during a Friday phone call.
Trump has been attacking the Democrat on Truth Social after deploying National Guard troops to Los Angeles—against the governor’s wishes—to intervene in protests in the city. The troops arrived Sunday, and clashes between protesters and law enforcement grew increasingly fraught throughout the day.
Newsom said he and Trump spoke late on Friday night—about 1.30 a.m. Saturday in D.C.—but Trump never brought up the National Guard. The protests broke out on Friday after a series of federal immigration raids on workplaces across Los Angeles.
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“We talked for almost 20 minutes and he barely, this issue never came up,” Newsom said on MSNBC. “I tried to talk about L.A., he wanted to talk about all these other issues. We had a very decent conversation.”
“He never once brought up the National Guard. He’s a stone-cold liar,” he added. “He said he did. Stone. Cold. Liar. Never did.”
“There’s no working with the president. There’s only working for him, and I will never work for Donald Trump,” he said.
“You’re creating the conditions that you claim you’re solving,” he later added.
The governor said he’s suing the Trump administration over its deployment of the National Guard and the lawsuit will be filed tomorrow.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
Earlier, Newsom had slammed Trump’s order to deploy the troops as unlawful and formally called for it to be rescinded. He has said the move was “purposefully inflammatory.”
It’s been about six decades since a president last sent in the National Guard without a governor’s request or approval.
“We didn’t have a problem until Trump got involved. This is a serious breach of state sovereignty—inflaming tensions while pulling resources from where they’re actually needed,” Newsom wrote on X earlier Sunday.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has echoed that sentiment, saying that the situation had been under control before the federal intervention sparked a “chaotic escalation.”
“Angelenos — don’t engage in violence and chaos. Don’t give the administration what they want,” she posted on Sunday night.
Ignoring calls for de-escalation from local leaders, Trump amped up the rhetoric throughout Sunday, even calling the protesters “insurrectionists” on Truth Social. He said he’d directed administration officials to “liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion.”
The president, who in January pardoned hundreds of rioters who took part in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, also attacked Newsom and Bass and called on them to “apologize to the people of Los Angeles for the absolutely horrible job that they have done.”
