California Governor Gavin Newsom loves to go straight for MAGA firebrands. But his latest swipe at White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller didn’t even need a fiery monologue; all it took was exactly two words.
Gavin Newsom said on ‘The Jack Cocchiarella Show’:
“He’s about cruelty and chaos.”
There was no restraint because Newsom very plainly said he has “nothing good to say” about Stephen Miller. The latter is the same Donald Trump ally he’s previously compared to Voldemort, just to jog your memory!
And Gavin Newsom backed it with some very real anecdotes. He described the “screams” of mothers during ICE raids as families were getting separated with no warning. Many kids wonder why their parents never come home from work. He also spoke of a 16-year-old who couldn’t even make eye contact after losing both parents in a raid at the vegetable-packing jobs they’d worked for two decades. He cited a 15-year-old with disabilities who said Border Patrol officers put a gun to his head outside his school while waiting for his sister.
BREAKING: Gavin Newsom wants to ban ICE agents from wearing masks. Trump tells ICE to ignore him.
Do you think Trump is right?
Yes / No pic.twitter.com/5pBsScgdJF
— Trump Fan (@bwllcx) November 21, 2025
That’s how Gavin Newsom is framing Miller as the architect of state-sanctioned suffering. We also need to remember at this point that the second-term Trump administration’s immigration agenda has been sharp, and Miller has been at the center of its most aggressive shifts. A few weeks ago, we saw Miller and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem set a quota for federal agents to arrest 3,000 people every day. That adds up to over a million per year and is reportedly triple the earlier targets.
ICE has also been instructed to make arrests in once off-limits locations that include schools, courthouses, and workplaces. And this can happen even if individuals are complying with court orders. Federal agencies totally unrelated to immigration enforcement have also been pulled in as detention centers are overflowing. Local police and sheriffs are being deputized to make arrests.
As Gavin Newsom put it,
“Quite literally, people are disappearing.”
On the same podcast episode, Cocchiarella also asked Gavin Newsom about Miller’s wife (Katie) and her struggling MAGA podcast, which features Mike Johnson and Pete Hegseth. Newsom didn’t answer this, though, as he respects the Millers overall.
FWIW this episode of the Katie Miller Podcast was posted to YouTube over 3 hours ago and it only has 79 views… https://t.co/vxucOX7ia6 pic.twitter.com/RWGpHhHKjv
— Brendan Hartnett 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@BrendanHartnett) November 12, 2025
From there, the governor said the Republican Party’s post-Trump succession plan is doomed. He cast JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro (and Stephen Miller, too) as players in a movement crushing under the weight of its factions. This can definitely be seen as some Democratic gloating, but the Republican disunity is very real.
