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Rough&Tumble is an aggregator scouring California newspapers, websites and other media to produce a daily digest of political news and analysis that reveals, at a glance, which political issues are currently preoccupying the state’s political class.
Broadcast journalist Jack Kavanagh created the website as an outgrowth of the tip sheet he circulated among his colleagues at KOVR, a Sacramento television station.
Monday’s edition typified recent versions, being utterly dominated by conflicts between California’s Democratic figures, especially Gov. Gavin Newsom, and a federal government controlled by President Donald Trump and Republican majorities in Congress.
The specifics include the administration’s immigration sweeps, the potential effects of a government shutdown due to a congressional stalemate, tariffs and, of course, the California redistricting ballot measure, Proposition 50, on the November 4 ballot. It could, if successful, shift five California congressional seats from Republicans to Democrats, countering a pro-Republican gerrymander in Texas in advance of the 2026 midterm elections.
It is, in a sense, just a more intense version of the long-standing transcontinental rivalry over policy issues between the national government in Washington and a state whose leaders often pretend that it is an independent nation.
However, it has taken on the aura of a holy war, something like the existential conflicts that raged in Europe during the Middle Ages, tinged with Newsom’s increasingly obvious hopes of succeeding Trump in 2028.
While resisting Trumpism may play well for Newsom within California and perhaps in other blue states, it also may be indirectly bolstering Trump’s standing in the nation as a whole, since he often portrays California as an example of failed progressive governance.
Trump Derangement Syndrome, as it’s been dubbed, also tends to displace attention to many issues that predate Trump’s era and will have a more profound effect on California’s future than anything Trump is likely to do.
He had nothing to do with California’s high rates of homelessness, poverty, and unemployment, its very high living costs, its shortage of housing, its long-standing water supply conundrum, the shortcomings of its public school system or the multi-billion dollar deficits in its state budget.
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