Gavin Newsom takes another swipe at Trump with updated fraud ‘tracker’

California Gov. Gavin Newsom this week updated his “public tracker” of fraudsters in the orbit of Donald Trump, adding the names of an additional 13 criminals whom the president has pardoned or otherwise legally assisted in recent years.

The new webpage, a rebuttal to the president’s repeated attacks on Newsom and his state, which the president last year branded as “very bad,” contains the names and photoshopped mugshots of former convicts such as Julie and Todd Chrisley, a married couple who gained notoriety first as reality television personalities on the USA Network and then later for being convicted in 2022 on charges of bank fraud, wire fraud and tax evasion. The couple was sentenced to a combined 19 years in prison before Trump vacated their sentences and pardoned them last May.

Others named on the new page include Brian Kelsey, a former Tennessee state senator who pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance laws during a failed 2016 congressional campaign; Jason Galanis, who was sentenced to 14 years in prison for defrauding Native Americans and other investors before testifying in a Republican inquiry seeking to impeach former President Joe Biden and gaining Trump’s favor; and Paul Manafort, the Republican campaign consultant who chaired Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 before being convicted of conspiracy against the United States and obstruction of justice, and sentenced to more than seven years in prison.

“Donald Trump is the personification of fraud,” Newsom is quoted as saying on the new webpage. “His hypocrisy knows no bounds: he is pardoning people convicted of fraud, corruption, and abusing the public trust — while turning around and using fraud as a launching pad to go after political rivals.”

The new webpage is a reboot of a project the governor publicized last month, a seeming rejoinder to the Trump administration’s repeated claims that crime in California is rising. The webpage contrasted statewide statistics showing decreases in homicide and assault with the president’s tendency to affiliate himself with other convicted criminals.

Speaking before the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday, Newsom continued his critique of the president and his administration, informing an audience that he’d been scheduled to speak at the event’s official U.S. pavilion, but had been unable to gain entrance after the White House had pressured organizers to exclude him. In response to that claim, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly provided the BBC with a statement that accused the governor of “frolicking around Switzerland instead of fixing the many problems he created in California,” and, employing a type of wordplay common on playgrounds, referred to him as “Newscum.”

Newsom, who last November said he was considering a presidential run in 2028, has increasingly made criticism of Trump, whether through stunts like his fraud tracker or on the international stage, a prominent component of his persona and political strategy. In Davos, he groused before an audience about the administration’s book bans, its “assault” on independent thought and Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s aggressive activity in Los Angeles, where Gregory Bovino, head of Border Patrol, seemed “as if he literally went on eBay and purchased SS garb,” a reference to the heavy trenchcoat the federal official has been seen wearing.

“Greg Bovino, secret police, private army, masked men, people disappearing, quite literally, no due process,” Newsom said. “Is it surprising the Trump administration didn’t like my commentary and wanted to make sure that I was not allowed to speak? No, it’s consistent with this administration and their authoritarian tendencies.”

Trump has over the years used California’s urban centers as emblematic of all that’s wrong with Democratic politics and, increasingly, as a justification for his own administration’s policies. In 2024, he blamed Newsom, and his opponent in the presidential election, Kamala Harris, for the “destruction” of San Francisco. Last August he publicly named and shamed some “bad, very bad” cities, including Chicago and Los Angeles, lamenting, it seemed, that they were “so far gone.”

But at Davos early in the week, Trump did not directly attack California’s governor, instead encouraging him, and other Democrats, to seek his administration’s help in reducing instances of violent crime: “I used to get along so great with Gavin when I was president. Gavin’s a good guy.”