Fight or Fix? Mahan Gives Rare Rebuke of Newsom’s Combative Tactics

San José Mayor Matt Mahan’s public rebuke of Gov. Gavin Newsom for his combative, Trump-trolling social media strategy has exposed a key fault line between California Democrats as they navigate Trump’s second term.

Should the party’s leaders focus on fighting President Donald Trump and his attempts to undermine the state’s values, rules and institutions? Or should they tune out the White House and prioritize fixing pressing issues such as affordability and public safety? The choice to fight or fix could not only divide California’s current crop of Democratic leaders but also animate future campaigns for governor in 2026 and the presidency in 2028.

“Democrats have to be really clear-eyed about where restraint is necessary and where we need leaders who are willing to sharpen their knives to confront Trump and his administration head-on,” Democratic strategist Trishala Vinnakota said.

Newsom has won praise from Democrats across the country for standing up to Trump — through lawsuits, a campaign to redraw California’s congressional districts and viral social media posts imitating the president. Mahan, like fellow Democratic mayor Daniel Lurie in San Francisco, has doubled down on a pragmatic approach centered on reducing street homelessness and crime — and avoiding partisan clashes over national issues.

But Mahan went further recently, becoming one of the few Democrats to criticize Newsom’s social media approach. In an op-ed in the San Francisco Standard, Mahan took issue with a post on social media platform X from Newsom’s office that mocked Bed, Bath & Beyond after the retailer’s executive chairman criticized California. In an interview with KQED, Mahan called the online battles a “sugar high” that leaves voters hungry for improvements on kitchen-table issues.

“I think if Democrats believe that we’re going to retake the White House through internet memes and trolling, we’ve got another thing coming,” Mahan told KQED. “People want to know what concrete actions we are going to take that will improve their lives, particularly by making their lives safer and more affordable.”

In a statement, Newsom spokesperson Tara Gallegos said, “There is no tension between good policy and effective communications strategies, including social media that speaks to the moment.”

“We’d ask Mayor Matt to spend his time less focused on the governor’s social media and his efforts to defend democracy, and instead focus on San José,” Gallegos said. “In the meantime, the governor will continue fighting for California.”

Throughout the summer, Newsom has escalated his political, legal and rhetorical fight against Trump and the Republican Party.

California has filed dozens of lawsuits against the administration and recently won a lower court decision against Trump’s use of the National Guard in Los Angeles. Newsom has championed a November ballot measure, Proposition 50, to redraw congressional lines to benefit Democrats, a direct response to Republican gerrymandering in Texas. And his office has posted a daily barrage of all-caps posts and AI-generated memes on X that parody Trump’s posts on Truth Social.

Newsom’s actions appear to have fulfilled a desire among Democratic voters for a more confrontational response to Trump. An August survey from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found Newsom’s approval rating has increased among California voters, who also approve of his role as a leading critic of Trump. And the governor has surged to the top of the 2028 Democratic primary field in recent polls from Yahoo/YouGov and Emerson College.

A former mayor who long argued that “localism is determinative” in realizing policy goals, Newsom said that his thinking on the political center of gravity shifted during the 2021 recall campaign. National conservative media outlets amplified the effort to remove him from office, and Newsom beat back the recall by painting it as a Trump-led takeover of the state.

“I came into that recall campaign still arguing that ‘all politics is local,’ I still had a romantic notion of that,” Newsom said last month at POLITICO’s California Policy Summit. “I didn’t fully appreciate how nationalized our politics had become. In so many ways, that shape-shifted a lot of what we’re doing and who I am today.”

The notion that all politics are no longer local is what Mahan called “the respectful, philosophic disagreement that the governor and I have.

“It is certainly true that we are now in a national media environment and that our national politics and the polarization that we’re seeing nationally has trickled down to the local level,” Mahan said. “While that is true and while one’s poll numbers can certainly be boosted in a blue state like California by trolling Trump all day online, I have to question where that leaves us as a country, and I think that ultimately the way to save our democracy is to make our government work.”

Next year’s race for governor could be framed by voters’ preference for a fighter or a fixer. When KQED Forum asked listeners last month what they wanted in the next leader of the state, most responses split neatly along those lines.

“Whoever succeeds in the CA Governors race will need to use the term ‘California Republic’ to express the sanctuary of democracy we are, and wield power at the level Governor Newsom has hinted at, but even more, to establish California as the bulwark against anti-democratic authoritarianism,” Michael Kowalczyk wrote. “Next California Governor requirement in this era: Newsom-and-then-some.”

Anthony Sacco said that approach was not appealing to him.

“I don’t want a ‘fighter’ for governor,” he wrote. “As Gavin Newsom’s conduct demonstrates, too often being a ‘fighter’ means seeking media coverage only for the purpose of advancing their political careers.”

To be sure, Newsom has deployed California Highway Patrol officers to reduce street crime and signed a landmark reform of the state’s environmental law in June to spur more housing production. Likewise, the city of San José has joined lawsuits against the Trump administration, and Mahan has openly criticized the president’s deportation policy.

But Mahan’s tenure as mayor has been defined by centrist pragmatism. He cruised to re-election last year by touting a focus on reducing unsheltered homelessness and crime and cleaning the streets of the state’s third-largest city. While Mahan has sparred often with local progressives (and Newsom, during last year’s campaign over tough-on-crime Proposition 36), he has largely avoided partisan fights and rarely comments on headlines from Washington.

His platform of “common-sense” politics was echoed by Daniel Lurie, who won San Francisco’s mayoral race in 2024 and has received approval ratings over 70% months in the job. Lurie, too, has steered clear of talking about Trump and instead has trumpeted business openings and economic recovery.

Vinnakota, who ran mayoral campaigns for Lurie in San Francisco and Loren Taylor in Oakland, said the limits of a mayor’s power, the nonpartisan nature of their role and the consequences of incurring Trump’s wrath can partially explain why Lurie and Mahan have not adopted Newsom’s strategy of confrontation with the president.

“Mayors are incentivized to be more pragmatic, even cautious, like Lurie and Mahan have been in their rhetoric,” Vinnakota said. “But the challenge for these mayors is that pragmatism in this moment, for a lot of Democrats, can look like appeasement.”

But in Oakland, newly elected Mayor Barbara Lee has charted a slightly different path. While Lee has focused much of her early work on homelessness and blight, she held a press conference last month to respond to Trump’s bashing of Oakland as he hinted at deploying National Guard troops to cities beyond Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

“Right now we have to maintain our unified posture and make sure we protect everybody — safe, secure — keep the peace, and push back and resist what is taking place,” Lee told KQED Forum this week. “We have to continue, though, at the same time, work on making our city better.”

The November election will bring new tests for the Democratic pragmatists and pugilists.

Newsom is building his Proposition 50 campaign to mirror his successful anti-recall effort, with the hope that Democratic voters will prioritize breaking GOP control in the House of Representatives over keeping independently-drawn congressional lines.

Meanwhile, in Mahan’s backyard, Santa Clara County voters will decide on Measure A, a sales tax increase that supporters are billing as an opportunity to push back against Trump for his social safety net cuts that will slice $500 million from the county budget next year.

Mahan said he’ll vote for Proposition 50 but won’t campaign for it. He is undecided on Measure A, explaining his support would be contingent on the county promising to fund more of his priorities — including supportive services for people in homeless shelters and inpatient treatment facilities.

Asked about the anti-Trump messaging likely to propel the two November measures, Mahan said he understood “the cathartic value of pushing back against an administration that is making certain policy decisions that fly in the face of what I think are pretty dominant values in California.”

“At the same time … we need to get beyond the performative and the symbolic and what may feel cathartic to the thing that I actually hear every day from residents, which is ‘I want government to make my life better,’” he said.