Gavin Newsom delivers his final State of the State address as California governor
By Steve Large
California Gov. Gavin Newsom warned that democracy is at stake as he urged the state to push back against President Donald Trump’s “assault on our values” during his final State of the State address Thursday.
Newsom highlighted California’s efforts to address homelessness and rising health care costs, while noting the state has filed more than 50 lawsuits against the Trump administration.
“The federal government, respectfully, it’s unrecognizable, protecting the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable,” the Democrat said to lawmakers at the state Capitol in Sacramento. “Their credo seems to be about fear – fear of the future, fear of the stranger, fear of change.”
He chided the Trump administration’s “carnival of chaos on the national stage,” and its efforts over the past year to withhold food aid from states, send the National Guard into Democratic-led cities, and cut funding for medical research.
California, by contrast, should be seen as a blueprint for the rest of the nation as it defends the state’s progressive policies against federal government overreach, Newsom said.
The Governor touted decreases in crime, investments in education, and an increase in revenue ahead of his final budget release..
“You may want to write this down,” Newsom said. “It includes revenues that are $42.3 billion higher than we forecasted. $42.3 billion higher. Why? Because our economy is growing.”
Republicans called the Governor’s messaging incomplete.
“That’s a perfect example of what’s said and what’s not said,” Republican California Senator Roger Niello said. “Revenues are up, but the problem is expenditures are increasing more than the revenues are.”
“California doesn’t have a revenue problem, it has a wasteful spending problem,” Republican California Senator Tony Strickland said.
Over the years, Newsom has used the annual address to tout California’s economic growth and technological innovation and push back against critiques of its high cost of living and having the largest homeless population in the country. This year, he derided critics as suffering from “California Derangement Syndrome,” a reference to Trump’s use of the term “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to call out his political opponents.
Newsom’s speech comes a day after the state marked a year since the devastating Los Angeles-area fires erupted, ripping through neighborhoods and killing 31 people.
In the months since, Newsom has asked Congress and Trump for billions of dollars in funding to help the region recover from the blazes, some of the most destructive in state history. Trump has not answered that call – one of the many disputes between him and the governor during his first year back in the presidency.
“It’s time for the President of the United States to act like the President of the United States — all the United States,” Newsom said.
The two have sparred over everything from Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops in L.A. to the federal government’s blocking of California’s first-in-the-nation ban on the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035.
Newsom also called for the creation of a state fund to help them rebuild.
“We can tell our children, we did not settle with the world as it was,” Newsom said. “We can say, with pride, we built something worthy of them. We built the future.”
The speech comes a day before he’s set to unveil his proposed budget for the next fiscal year after years facing budget shortfalls.
California GOP response
California Republican legislative leaders held an official response to Newsom’s State of the State immediately following his address.
Assembly Republican Leader Emeritus James Gallagher said his caucus agrees with many of the issues Newsom highlighted but disagrees with how the state arrived at this point.
“First we need to recognize that, mostly, our policy has been on the wrong track,” Gallagher said. “And that over the eight years of Gavin Newsom, we’ve mostly stayed in entrenched policies that have made Californians’ lives worse. We have to reform and change those policies if we truly want to see something better.”
Other prominent California Republican leaders also released their own statements about Newsom’s address.
Congressman Vince Fong’s statement harped on California’s unemployment insurance trust fund and the debt it is incurring.
“That California stands alone as the only delinquent state is not merely a travesty—it is a stark indictment of budget and priority mismanagement,” Fong wrote.
Newsom’s first in-person State of the State in years
Thursday’s address was the first time since 2020 that Newsom held an in-person State of the State address in front of the legislature.
Newsom said he had not been comfortable with written speeches because of his dyslexia and asked for grace ahead of the address.
“The reason I haven’t been back here in a few years is, as you know, I have no problem speaking, perhaps sometimes a little more long-windedly, than people like,” Newsom said. “But when it comes to the written text, that has never served me well.”
The governor did read mostly from teleprompters.
The very first State of the State address in 1850 shows the status of California’s statehood then, written by Gov. Peter Burnett, with the first sentence reading: “Gentlemen of the Senate and Assembly, the circumstances under which you have assembled are most new interesting and extraordinary.”
Alex Vassar, spokesperson for the California State Library, said that 176 years later, the annual address offers a snapshot of California’s triumphs and tragedies and everyday troubles.
“The requirement has always been that it’s important for the governor as the first person who oversees the operation of the state, the head of the executive branch, that he notified the legislature of what his concerns are, how things are running,” Vassar said.
Newsom seemed to be carrying on the traditional speech when he took office in 2019. However, since the COVID-19 pandemic, he has not delivered his State of the State speech in the Capitol building. Instead, he delivered his 2021 remarks from an empty Dodger Stadium and resorted to pre-recorded video in the final week of the legislative session in 2025.
Gov. Earl Warren began delivering the State of the State in the form of a speech to the legislature in the 1960s.
