'Vulgar display of weakness': Newsom delivers scathing rebuke of Trump

California Gov. Gavin Newsom unleashed a blistering rebuke of Donald Trump on Thursday as he slammed the president’s deployment of the California National Guard as "an abomination," and called his planned military parade on Saturday a “vulgar display of weakness.”

The fiery comments from the Democratic governor, viewed as a possible 2028 White House contender, came moments after a federal judge on Thursday night temporarily blocked Trump from deploying the National Guard to Los Angeles, a move the judge ripped as “illegal.”

Newsom, speaking to reporters in San Francisco, where U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer held an emergency hearing over the legality of Trump’s troop deployment, warned that the president’s defiance of the order would sink the country into “a constitutional crisis, the likes of which we haven't seen in our lifetime.”

“He must work under the constraints as a constitutional officer of the Constitution of the United States of America,” Newsom insisted Thursday. “That's what this court order demands of the president of the United States. He is not a monarch. He is not a king. And he should stop acting like one.”

But Newsom also tore into Trump over other hot topics of the day. In response to a question about Trump’s multimillion-dollar military parade scheduled for Saturday, Newsom didn’t mince words.

“It’s a vulgar display of weakness,” Newsom said. “It’s the kind of thing you see, Kim Jong Un, you see Putin, you see it with dictators around the world that are weak and just want to demonstrate strength, weakness, masquerading as strength.”

“What an embarrassment,” Newsom added. “Honestly, it's that's about as small as it gets. How weak. How weak do you have to be to commandeer the military to fete you on your birthday in a vulgar display of weakness? That’s Donald Trump.”

Newsom continued his criticism of the Trump administration over the treatment of Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA), who was forcibly removed from a news conference earlier in the day by federal agents, before being shoved to the ground by three officers and handcuffed.

“It was a disgrace,” Newsom said of the incident Thursday, adding that the California senator was “one of the most mild-mannered, decent people you'll meet.”

Watch the video below via MSNBC or at the link here: