‘Whaddya Think About Newscum?’: Newsom Recalls Trump Tete-a-Tete

It was the night before Donald Trump was set to dispatch federal troops to Los Angeles, and Gavin Newsom was on the phone with the US president.

The subject of their conversation was anything but the military deployment.

“Whaddya think about Newscum? It’s pretty good, isn’t it?” the California governor recalled Trump asking him, referring to the nickname the president had coined. Newsom said he replied: “Well, it’s not really original. There was literally a guy in seventh grade on Baltimore Street who used to call me that.”

The tete-a-tete offers a window into the idiosyncratic relationship between Newsom and ...