Newsom says he’s ‘deeply concerned’ about Trump, Bannon comments floating 2028 run
California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks with Jonathan Karl of ABC News. (ABC News)
(WASHINGTON) — California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said he is “deeply concerned” about remarks from President Donald Trump and his close allies about possibly seeking a third term in 2028.
Newsom, who is considered a potential 2028 presidential contender himself, was asked by ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl if he takes such talk seriously.
“They’re not screwing around,” Newsom said.
Trump has mused several times about running for president again, including as recently as Monday, when he told reporters on Air Force One that he would “love to do it” despite it being barred by the Constitution.
The 22nd Amendment expressly forbids a president from being elected to office more than twice.
Last week, Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House adviser and conservative media provocateur, said in an interview with The Economist that “there’s a plan” and Trump “is going to get a third term” though he didn’t share any details.
Here’s a transcript of the exchange between Newsom and Karl in the interview that will air on Wednesday in which Newsom talks about his meeting with Trump in the Oval Office in February.
KARL: “Bannon is talking Trump running again 2028 and you said Trump was talking about his fourth term?”
NEWSOM: “He was showing me a photo of — I turned around, he was at the Resolute [Desk], and he goes, ‘Look over there.’ I’m like, and I literally looked and I looked him. I’m like, ‘OK.’ I said, ‘Third term?’ He goes, ‘No, fourth.’ And it was FDR’s painting up on the wall. I’m like, here we go. I said, ‘We’re perfect little sheep, aren’t we?’ He’s laughing because we are. He knows exactly what we’re going to do. There’s a French, I don’t know what the, I can’t say it in French — poem that loosely says, ‘He pisses on the grasshoppers to hear them sing.’ And that’s Donald Trump.”
KARL: “So do you take that seriously? Do you think he is going to try to stay in office?”
NEWSOM: “What I’ve noticed, what we all have experienced, I hope we’re absorbing in our souls, because we’re talking about the soul of America, is, I don’t think he takes himself seriously, but he iterates. He throws things out. And he plays with it, and he sees how people react, and it manifests. Meaning, once a mind is stretched, it never goes back to its original form. And that’s my concern. The more we’re talking about this — and we need to be. Look at what he’s doing with masked agents. Look what he’s doing federalizing the Guard. Look what he’s doing to intimidate and voter suppression. Look what he’s going to do with the DOJ. Look what he’s trying to do to rig the elections: North Carolina, Missouri, down there, next Florida, not just in Texas. Look what he’s doing in terms of the $230 million that is, apparently, his from his DOJ. All the pardoning, all the this — this great grift, the biggest, most corrupt administration in history. Not just the $400 million plane, but the billion dollars of your tax money as we’re cutting food stamps to pay for the damn plane so he can take that toy home with his foundation when he’s 93 or whatever he’s done with his fourth or fifth term. I’m deeply concerned about it. And guys like Bannon, they’re not screwing around. They’re not screwing around.”
Members of the National Guard and members of Federal Law Enforcement Agencies stand outside the main hall of Union Station, on September 04, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Some Washington, D.C. residents fanned out across the halls of Congress on Thursday, urging lawmakers to end President Donald Trump’s federal law enforcement surge in the nation’s capital.
The demonstrations came the same day the U.S. Army extended orders for the Washington, D.C., National Guard to remain on active duty in the nation’s capital through Nov. 30, two U.S. officials told ABC News.
In small groups of five, demonstrators carried a letter from advocacy group “Free DC” to congressional offices calling on lawmakers to “do everything in your power to end the occupation of Washington, D.C., as swiftly as possible.”
The letter, obtained by ABC News, described Trump’s declaration as “an ongoing and increasing danger to D.C. residents” and a “direct threat to democracy in the United States and the governing power of the U.S. Congress.”
“This is an active military takeover of the capital. It is a textbook indicator of backsliding democracy and intensifying authoritarianism,” the letter stated. “This might come off as alarmist, but in the last 100 years of history, the pattern is clear and we are witnessing it in real time.”
White House Spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement to ABC News on Thursday, “Cracking down on crime should not be a partisan issue, but some Democrats and activists are trying to make it one.”
“It’s bizarre that these liberal activists would protest the significant drops in violent crime in DC thanks to President Trump’s historic effort to Make DC Safe Again,” Jackson said.
The activists also pressed lawmakers to reject nearly a dozen Republican-backed bills that would expand federal power in the District. Some D.C. residents paired up with seasoned organizers to knock on doors and meet congressional staffers.
“I just feel like our democracy is slipping away,” said Michelle Castro, who has lived in D.C. for 24 years but said she stepped inside the Capitol for the first time Thursday.
Castro, the daughter of an Air Force veteran, joined the advocacy group Free D.C. after the deployment of armed troops. “As a military family, seeing the troops in the streets is very upsetting,” she told ABC News. “To see our military being used as political tools is just wrong. It’s not American. It’s not why they signed up.”
Castro said she had attended rallies before but never lobbied lawmakers. For many D.C. residents, the nation’s capital can feel like two separate cities, one for politics and federal workers, and another where locals live without voting representation in Congress beyond Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton.
“As a D.C. resident, just feeling like there’s no one, I don’t have a person to go to their office or to call,” Castro said. “Whenever they’re like, ‘Call your reps,’ I’m like, who do I call?”
For others, the deployment stirred painful family memories. Julie Cruz, who said her great-grandparents were murdered by the Nazis, said she grew up visiting relatives in East Germany and seeing Russian soldiers with machine guns on the streets.
“I personally find it very traumatizing to see troops occupying our city,” she said. “They should be going home to their families and their communities.”
Not everyone is protesting the law enforcement surge in the District.
“D.C. became one of America’s most dangerous cities because of failed, soft-on-crime policies that devastated innocent families while coddling the very criminals terrorizing our states and it made our capitol unsafe for residents, for visitors, for members of Congress, and unfortunately, even for our interns and our staff,” said Republican Rep. Ron Estes.
In June, one of Estes’ interns, 21-year-old Eric Tarpinian-Jachym of Granby, Massachusetts, was fatally shot.
“We’re having to turn our attention in Congress on doing what the District of Columbia, its mayor and their leadership should have done long ago, and that’s to keep the city safe,” the congressman said.
Tarpinian-Jachym’s killing remains unsolved. Authorities have offered a $40,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible.
“President Trump has rightfully exercised his authority to restore law and order here over the last few weeks, and what a tremendous job our federal law enforcement officers have done for this city,” he said. “This is what happens when you have leadership that actually cares about public safety,” he added.
The D.C. Police Union, which represents the members of the Metropolitan Police Department, welcomed Trump’s move, saying the department hit a 50-year low in staffing and needed the federal help.
Union chairman Gregg Pemberton said the federal surge has made D.C. officers’ jobs “easier.”
“You have more law enforcement officers, you have less work, you have less crime,” he said.
He added, “We want to get back to a place where MPD is doing 100% of this job.”
Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, whose careful rhetoric has drawn both Trump’s praise and activists’ scorn, has been negotiating with the administration as she tries to protect the city’s limited autonomy.
On Tuesday, Bowser released a new order, which she called a plan for exiting the crime emergency declared by Trump. The mayor’s plan calls for continuing the work of the “Safe and Beautiful Emergency Operations Center,” which Bowser’s office says will manage the city’s response after the initial 30-day lapses.
“My 100% focus is on exiting the emergency and that’s where all of our energies are,” Bowser said. “I think in creating the EOC, we mean to demonstrate … that we are organized to best use our own public safety resources and any additional public safety resources, and I think that’s the message for the Congress.”
Still, tensions are high. Several residents have circulated a “no confidence” letter targeting Bowser’s leadership, while local activists and even some councilmembers blasted her for thanking Trump for the surge of federal law enforcement, which brought down crime.
On Wednesday, D.C.-based politicians met privately with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who pledged to help with their efforts in the Senate. Maryland Democratic Rep. Glenn Ivey, recalling Washington’s violent crack epidemic in the 1990s, said federal intervention was not the answer.
“When I first became a prosecutor here in Washington, D.C., it was 1990, that was the height of the crack fight, 450 to 500 homicides per year,” Ivey said. “They called it Dodge City. We fought against that, and under home rule, the leadership turned it around. Now we’ve got some of the lowest crime rates in 30 years.”
Councilmember Robert White called D.C. “ground zero for saving democracy.”
“It is clear the president has said he is doing this in Maryland and New York and California, now in Louisiana,” White said. “So democracy will be stripped away everywhere, not just in D.C. We just happen to be ground zero. That is why we must stop it now.”
Councilmember Janeese Lewis George urged unity: “We need to be strong, and we need to be united. Home rule in the District is what we are fighting for. That is all of our North Star.”
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump on Monday said he is still prepared to order National Guard troops to American cities besides the nation’s capital, but that he wanted local officials to request his help.
The comments come after Trump threatened Chicago as the next city he would target after his administration’s federal takeover of Washington, prompting pushback from Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, who on Monday afternoon called the proposed actions “un-American.”
“They should be saying, ‘Please come in,'” Trump told ABC News Correspondent Jay O’Brien as he took questions from reporters the Oval Office after signing executive orders.
Trump still railed against Chicago, which he called a “disaster,” and Pritzker, who he said was a “slob.”
“I made the statement that next should be Chicago, because, as you all know, Chicago is a killing field right now, and they don’t acknowledge it. And they say, ‘We don’t need him. Freedom. Freedom. He’s a dictator. He’s a dictator.’ A lot of people are saying ‘maybe we like a dictator.’ I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person,” the president said.
“But I’m really saying, and I say this to all of you, in a certain way, we should wait to be asked,” Trump continued.
Trump went back and forth repeatedly on Monday over whether the government should wrest control or wait to be asked.
“We may wait. We may or may not. We may just go in and do it, which is probably what we should do,” Trump said. “The problem is, it’s not nice when you go in and do it and somebody else is standing there saying, as we give great results, say, ‘Well, we don’t want the military.'”
Meanwhile, Pritzker and Chicago officials are speaking out against Trump’s threat to deploy the National Guard.
“Earlier today, in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, ‘Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?’ Instead, I say, ‘Mr. President, do not come to Chicago,'” Pritzker said at a news conference in Chicago on Monday afternoon.
“What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American,” the governor added.
Crime statistics from Chicago’s Police Department show murders year to date and robberies are down 31% and 33% respectively compared to the same period in 2024. Overall, the statistics show crime in the city is down 13% year to date compared to 2024.
“There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention,” Pritzker said on Monday. “There is no insurrection. Like every major American city in both blue and red states, we deal with crime in Chicago. Indeed, the violent crime rate is worse in red states and red cities.”
ABC News Senior Political Correspondent Rachel Scott pressed Trump on whether he would send troops to Republican-led states and cities experiencing high crime. Trump said yes but appeared to brush off that it would ever be necessary.
“Sure,” Trump responded. “But there aren’t that many of them.”
Trump continued to focus on Democrat-led areas and railed against cashless bail policies, though a report from Axios that analyzed FBI crime data showed 13 of the 20 U.S. cities with the highest murder rates were in Republican-run states.
The president on Monday defended the first 11 days of his administration’s takeover of Washington, which includes more than a thousand National Guardsmen deployed to the nation’s capital, some permitted to carry weapons for personal protection.
As part of his crime crackdown, Trump signed an executive order aimed at ending cashless bail in Washington and threatening to revoke federal funds for other areas around the country that have similar policies.
The president also signed an order directing the Justice Department to investigate instances of flag burning for possible charges, despite a 1989 Supreme Court ruling that the government cannot criminalize destruction of an American flag when done as an act of expression.
Graham Platner, a military veteran and oysterman from a small town near Maine’s Acadia National Park, will run for U.S. Senate as a Democrat, he announced on Tuesday, in an effort to oust Republican Susan Collins, the five-term senator who is expected to run for reelection next year.
A campaign launch video shows Platner, bearded and broad-shouldered with a gruff voice, harvesting oysters and chopping wood as he describes how Maine has become “essentially unlivable for working-class people.”
In an interview Monday with ABC News, Platner said he was driven to run by the growing wealth gap in the U.S., which he said has crippled working-class people in his home state.
“We are moving in a position where regular, working-class people can’t even afford to live in the towns that they were born in,” said Platner, who after four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with the Army and Marine Corps, moved to the coastal community of Sullivan where he grew up.
Platner might draw comparisons to Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman or Dan Osborn, the union leader running as an independent for the Senate in Nebraska after a failed attempt last year. Both men campaigned for the Senate as champions, and representatives, of the white working class, a demographic with whom Democrats have lost ground in recent cycles.
Platner has hired Fight Agency, a Democratic consulting firm whose members have worked for Fetterman and Osborn’s campaigns, as well as that of Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for New York mayor.
“I drink coffee every morning with the guys that I work next to, who are friends of mine, who all voted for Donald Trump. And they voted for Donald Trump because they wanted something new, they wanted change,” Platner told ABC News, arguing that his understanding of these voters could help steer the Democratic Party, which he described as “quite confused,” back to a winning track.
“The Democratic Party needs to return to an age where it is the party of labor unions, it is the party of community organizers, it is the party of fighting for big structural change to benefit working class people,” he said.
Asked who he believes is the face of the Democratic Party, Platner said there isn’t one, but he indicated an affinity for some of the most progressive members of the Senate.
He said he admires the former Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and respects Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I.
Platner described “Medicare for All” as an urgent priority and called the war in Gaza a “genocide,” saying he follows the lead of “Israeli scholars on genocide.”
On the hot-button cultural issue of transgender women’s participation in sports, he said the topic is a “distraction from the things that impact Americans materially every single day.”
“I am dedicated to equality and justice for all in this country,” Platner said. “And I think that this specific topic has become such a touchstone of the media discussion because it pulls us away from the conversation that needs to be happening, which is getting every American affordable health care.”
Maine briefly became the center of the debate over transgender youth in sports in February, after a public spat between President Trump and Maine Gov. Janet Mills over the Trump’s administration’s threat to withhold funding over a Maine anti-discrimination law that lets transgender women participate in girls’ and women’s sports.
Shortly afterward, at a demonstration protesting the Trump administration, Platner, who leads a Democratic grassroots group in Hancock County, said Mills “displayed great courage when she defended Maine’s laws to Donald Trump’s face,” according to a transcript of the remarks posted online by a local Democratic group.
Mills, a Democrat, has not ruled out entering the race and has reportedly been urged to run by national Democrats who believe she would offer the best chance at flipping Collins’ seat.
Asked about a potential primary challenge from Mills, Platner told ABC News that Democrats “really need to stop running the same kind of playbook over and over and over again.
“I think we really need to start thinking outside of the box on the type of candidates that we’re sending into these races,” he said.
Asked if he has spoken with national Democrats about backing his campaign, Platner said no.
“Nobody has called me, and I’m not really in a position to call anybody because I’m the harbormaster of Sullivan, Maine,” he said.
