Despite Trump’s Goading, White House Fails to ‘Booby-Trap’ Governors
The National Governors Association’s Winter Meeting in Washington usually unfolds like most regular gatherings of state government leaders: breaking bread, all-together-now speechifying, and meeting up to find best practices that can travel between Republican and Democratic states. Outside of reporters, policy nerds, and companies finagling state contracts, the governors’ public meetings operate way under the radar for most of the city’s movers and shakers.
Except for this year. States’ rights to resist an out-of-control federal executive took center stage after President Trump’s unsuccessful attempt to sabotage the bipartisan governors’ forum. “You failed,” is how Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD), the NGA vice chair, summed up the soap opera atmosphere that unfurled after Trump tried to disinvite Democratic governors to the customary White House meetings last week. He was met by a united front of Republican governors who wouldn’t attend if their colleagues weren’t included. Trump responded by labeling Gov. Kevin Stitt (R-OK), the NGA chair, a RINO, and disinviting Moore and Gov. Jared Polis (D-CO) to the Friday working meeting.
Moore did make it to that White House breakfast, as did Gov. Janet Mills (D-ME), who tangled with the president last year. But Democrats as a group skipped the dinner, leaving only the Republican governors to meet with the president and some administration officials. Trump showed up for that meeting, but only briefly.
At a Saturday panel discussion, not so ironically titled “Respect in Politics,” Moore, Stitt, and Tim Shriver, the chairman of Special Olympics International, all carefully expressed their dismay at what the governors had been dealing with from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The NGA has already fractured along partisan lines, with three Democratic governors—Tim Walz of Minnesota, Laura Kelly of Kansas, and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan—leaving the organization last year over concerns about diminishing bipartisanship. The president appears to have believed that he could leverage more discord and defections.
“There are a lot of forces over these past weeks that were intended and hell-bent on breaking this up,” said Moore, who is often seen as a potential 2028 Democratic presidential contender. “This could have gone lot of different directions despite everything that we have seen and heard, and all the booby traps that were laid out that had the intention of blowing us up.” As the governors had largely not fallen into those traps, Moore pronounced the organization “stronger than ever.”
For his part, Stitt shined a light on federalism and pushed back against the White House pressure to have states conform to the president’s ever-changing slate of policy pronouncements.
“When you try to have a super-strong federal government that says we want everyone to be like California or Oklahoma or Maryland, pick your state or whoever is in power, that is a turnoff to half the country [and] four years later we flip,” he said. “States’ rights are important for every one of us, there is a reason we have check and balances: We have a fear of executive overreach.”
Shriver cautioned that Americans are in the thick of a decades-old conflict that uses contempt to secure political advantages through social media excesses and appeals to their partisans. “We have to recognize our collective complicity in the system that dehumanizes one another and our collective responsibility to change it,” he said. “If we don’t address the issue of how contempt is tearing the country apart at the federal level and paralyzing the federal government’s capacity to get things done, we will not solve [our] problems.”
The fracturing between the states and the White House is readily apparent on several fronts. Some Democratic and Republican states alike have taken up mid-decade redistricting initiatives, and others have resisted them entirely. Data center construction increasingly pits fierce and growing resistance from states and localities over burgeoning energy prices, as well as land and water use, against the president’s insistence on dispensing with regulatory hurdles that residents believe are well within their rights to erect.
Similarly, ICE’s plans for so-called “detention centers” are already throwing communities into confusion and opposition in Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, and Oklahoma, among others, which promises to keep governors on the front lines and in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
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