Gavin Newsom Gives Full-Throated Praise For Recent Trump Policy

Gavin Newsom calling a Trump policy "one of the best things he's done" is the kind of sentence you have to read twice. This is a man who has spent years positioning himself as the anti-Trump, the guy who'll sue the administration before breakfast and lecture the country about it by lunch. And here he is telling California families to go sign their kids up for Trump Accounts. Something moved him off script, and it wasn't a change of heart about the president.

What moved him is that the policy is actually good, and good in a way that's hard to spin as anything else. A savings account for every kid, seeded by the government, growing tax-advantaged until adulthood, is the sort of idea that used to get bipartisan applause before everything became a loyalty test. Newsom knows his own voters would benefit from it. He also knows refusing to say so out loud would make him look like he cares more about denying Trump a win than about actual families getting actual money.

So he split the difference: praise the account, ignore the man who signed it into existence. It's a small moment but a telling one. When a policy is popular and functional, even the fiercest Trump critics can't pretend otherwise for long. Newsom didn't do this out of generosity. He did it because the alternative was getting caught rooting against something that helps his own constituents, and even he isn't quite that far gone.

We'll take the compliment on Trump's behalf, backhanded as it is. Good policy has a way of embarrassing people who'd rather score points than admit it. If Newsom keeps finding more of these moments, that says less about him discovering common ground and more about how hard it's become to find anything real to attack.