Donald Trump promised in one of his last campaign speeches to work with Democratic mayors and governors if he is re-elected. But just hours after the former president was projected to retake the White House, some Democratic state leaders were actively plotting against him.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, one of Trump’s fiercest critics, on Thursday called a special legislative session to funnel more resources into the state’s legal defenses to preemptively combat Republican policies on immigration, the environment, LGBTQ+ rights and reproductive care.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James, one of Trump’s most aggressive adversaries in his first term, pledged to strengthen coordination between their offices to “protect the fundamental freedoms of New Yorkers from any threat.” potential”.
And Democratic state attorneys general are prepared to take Trump to court, just as their predecessors did hundreds of times during his first administration.
If Trump’s re-election represented a realignment in American politics, blue-state leaders are choosing to meet it with a return to form, resuming the counterbalancing roles they played during his first administration as their party faces a national repudiation. .
“We have been talking for months with attorneys general across the country, preparing, planning and strategizing for the possibility of this day,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a news conference in San Francisco on Thursday.
Trump’s two-year campaign to retake the White House – and polls that for months showed he could succeed – gave Democrats the time they lacked in 2016 to shore up their defenses against conservative policies. And they are using as a guide their campaign calls for mass deportations and regulatory rollbacks, as well as Project 2025, the conservative plan for a Republican administration that Trump has distanced himself from but which dozens of former officials from his administration participated in the preparation.
Governors and legislators in several Democratic states have already passed laws strengthening reproductive rights since the fall of Roe and stockpiled the abortion pill mifepristone in response to new legal threats to reproductive care. While Trump has promised to veto a national abortion ban, that has not eased Democrats’ fears. And as he approached a second term, they were quick to address other areas of concern, pushing ballot measures to protect same-sex marriage, labor rights and other liberal causes.
Although he briefly promised to work across parties in the final days of his campaign, Trump has also vowed to punish his political opponents, and many Democratic state leaders top his list of adversaries. On Friday, the president-elect criticized Newsom for calling a special legislative session.
“Governor Gavin Newscum is trying to KILL our nation’s beautiful California,” Trump said Friday in a post on Social Truthusing his derisive nickname for the governor. “He is using the term ‘Trump Proof’ as a way to stop all the GREAT things that can be done to ‘Make California Great Again.’”
And so Democratic governors and attorneys general who have spent months strategizing how to protect their states’ progressive policies from a potential second Trump term are pushing those efforts faster.
Some governors are discussing how to ensure federal funding for state projects reaches their coffers before Trump takes office, potentially with full Republican control of Congress, said a person who works in the office of a Democratic governor who is He granted anonymity to reveal private conversations. The discussions convey concerns among some Democrats that Republicans could suspend spending on, or even repeal, President Joe Biden’s signature programs, such as the fries and Reduction of inflation facts.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker also said Thursday that he has spoken with other Democratic governors since the election about how to better protect their states from Trump.
“There are many people whose lives and livelihoods are at risk, and there are many people who cried over the (election) result because they know the impact it can have on their families,” Pritzker said at a news conference Thursday.
He also gave a warning: “You come for my people, you come through me.”
In California, where Democratic leaders became some of the de facto bosses of the Trump resistance after his election in 2016, officials spent months working to shore up the state’s climate policies and disaster preparedness in anticipation of a government antagonistic federal even before Newsom called the special legislature. session.
“The freedoms we hold dear in California are under attack,” Newsom declared in a statement. “And we will not sit idly by.”
In New York, Hochul and James created the Empire State Freedom Initiative, a program aimed at addressing “political and regulatory threats” from the incoming Trump administration, including reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights, as well as gun and gun safety. environmental justice. The New York governor also signaled that she will propose legislation and take executive action in response to Trump’s victory, but did not provide details.
“New York will continue to be a bastion of freedom and the rule of law,” Hochul said. “I will do everything in my power to ensure that New York remains a bulwark against efforts to deny those rights in other states.”
James could have a huge impact on how Trump’s policies reach New York. The Democrat, first elected in 2018, sued Trump’s real estate business for fraud. He won a $450 million judgment, which is being appealed.
Meanwhile, state prosecutors who often served as the first line of defense against Trump’s most controversial executive orders in his last term — united in trying to block his travel restrictions from some Muslim-majority countries — are questioning his plans to roll back vehicle emissions standards. and more—have long been preparing to once again serve as a legal bulwark.
In California, state lawyers have prepared meticulously for Trump’s return, including drafting briefs, weighing specific legal arguments and debating favorable litigation venues, Bonta, the attorney general, told POLITICO.
“If you take office and follow the law and don’t violate the constitution and don’t violate other important laws, like the Administrative Procedure Law that you violated all the time last time, then there’s nothing we can do. “Bonta said. “But if he violates the law, as he has said he would, as Project 2025 says, then we are ready. … We have gone down to the detail of: Which court do we appear in?”
In New Jersey, state Attorney General Matt Platkin cited mass deportations, an “aggressive reading of the law of shares” to potentially impose an abortion ban and “gut drinking water protections” as potential sources of litigation.
“If you look at the things that the president and his associates have said during the campaign… if you read Project 2025, there are proposals that are clearly illegal and that would undermine the rights of our residents,” Platkin said in an interview.
And in Massachusetts, the office of first-term Attorney General Andrea Campbell has been preparing to act against threats to reproductive, LGBTQ+ and immigrant rights and student loan forgiveness programs, among other areas.
Responding to a request for comment, Trump’s team said in a statement: “The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin, giving him the mandate to implement the promises he made during the election campaign. He will comply.”
Democrats’ rush to reform their resistance to Trump is partly self-serving. The governors and state attorneys who took on Trump during his first term burnished their national profiles in the process.
In some cases, they were able to leverage their opposition to higher office: Maura Healey of Massachusetts leveraged her lawsuits against Trump as attorney general to help win the governorship in 2022; Xavier Becerra of California, the state’s former attorney general, is now secretary of Health and Human Services in the Biden administration and is considering a run for governor. And for Democrats who have been eager for a chance to climb out of the party’s deep seat, a second Trump term presents a new opportunity for a potentially star turn ahead of the open 2028 presidential primaries.
Those maneuvers, in a way, have already begun. Several Democratic state leaders held news conferences on Wednesday and Thursday to reassure anxious voters, also serving as a way to establish themselves as leaders in the anti-Trump fight. On Wednesday, Healey was on MSNBC promising that state police would not be involved in carrying out the mass deportations Trump has promised, leveraging a national platform in a way he rarely has since challenging Trump in the courtroom as attorney general.
But there was some recognition among top city and state Democrats that they would also have to find ways to work with Trump, primarily on infrastructure projects that often rely on massive amounts of federal funding.
“If it’s contrary to our values, we will fight to the death,” New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said during a Wednesday news conference about the election results. “If there is an opportunity to reach common ground, we will seize it as quickly as anyone.”
New York City Mayor Eric Adams similarly pledged to find ways to partner with the incoming administration, naming infrastructure as a target area for future collaboration.
“I reached out to the president yesterday to tell him there are a lot of issues here in the city that we want to work on together with the administration,” Adams said during a news conference Thursday. “The city must move forward.”
Holly Otterbein, Melanie Mason, Nick Reisman, Daniel Han, Maya Kaufman, Shia Kapos and Kelly Garrity contributed to this report.