Gov. Gavin Newsom says he'll tell Davos economic forum what he thinks of Trump

Lia Russell, The Sacramento Bee on Jan 16, 2026

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom will attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, next week, where he will make a speech criticizing President Donald Trump for disrupting the United States' relationships with global allies, his office said Friday.

Newsom is scheduled to speak next Thursday at the annual meeting, one day after Trump is expected to give a special address. The meeting’s theme this year is “How can we cooperate in a more contested world?”

“Trump’s economic agenda betrays our nation: it is not ‘America First’ but ‘Trump First’ — rewarding the favored, punishing the dissenters, and burdening the rest,” Newsom said in a statement. “At the World Economic Forum, I will forcefully confront these abuses and resolutely defend the principles to which California owes its economic strength: disciplined governance, world-leading universities, boundless innovation, and an open embrace of global cultures.

Politico first reported Newsom’s plans to attend the summit. His wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, was in Northern Italy this week touring an organic farm and discussing gender-based violence with national lawmakers but will not be attending Davos.

Newsom, who is mulling a run for president in 2028, has tried to make inroads with leaders of other countries as Trump has alternatively levied and backed away from imposing crushing tariffs on trade with foreign countries, ordered the arrest of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and threatened to annex Greenland. While he cannot negotiate his own deals, Newsom has pleaded with companies overseas to spare California from retaliatory taxes and recently attended a global climate summit in Brazil to play up California’s role in mitigating climate change.

“As Trump undermines long-standing alliances, California will remain a beacon of stability and loyalty,” he said. “To remain silent in the face of such wrongdoing is not neutrality — it is complicity.”

The economic summit has long attracted criticism and conspiracies for convening global celebrities, business leaders and political elite in a Swiss resort town.

As mayor of San Francisco between 2004 and 2011, Newsom was a frequent attendee, drawing sneers from his political opponents who painted him as a “Davos Democrat” who was out of touch with his hometown’s growing wealth inequity and homelessness problem.

His office could not immediately say when Newsom had last traveled to Davos but that it likely predated when he became governor in 2019.

Newsom attended the forum on at least five occasions as mayor between 2004 and 2009, sometimes alongside executives, like Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, with whom he is close. At the time, he defended those trips, saying they were “in line” with his duties as a city executive, and that he reimbursed Google for his flight.

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