California Gov. Gavin Newsom has claimed that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller deliberately avoided him while the pair were standing backstage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“Stephen Miller refused to even make eye contact with @CAGovernor Gavin Newsom backstage at Davos,” Newsom’s press office posted on X, adding, “Total beta!”
When contacted by the Daily Beast, a spokesperson for Newsom said, “They were backstage at the same time. A bunch of senior Trump officials were fangirling the Governor and went out of their way to say hi to their Daddy — but Stephen Miller clocked the Governor and scurried off like the little ghoul cuck he is. Honestly, we almost feel bad for Katie.” The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
Newsom continued his trolling of Miller with a second post to X later in the day, sharing an image of senior Border Patrol official Greg Bovino in a long black coat that he had previously described as “Nazi-coded” and asking, “Hey, Stephen — when are you going to start wearing one of Greg’s coats?”
Miller, who is Jewish, has previously been denounced by his own relatives for the cruelty he has overseen as the architect of the Trump administration’s hardline border control and anti-immigration policies.
“We celebrated holidays each year with the reminder to stand up and say ‘never again.’ But what you are doing breaks that sacred promise. It breaks everything we were taught,” Miller’s cousin Alisa Kasmer wrote in a heartfelt Facebook post in July 2025.
Newsom and Miller are both in Davos for the World Economic Forum alongside a host of world leaders, including President Donald Trump, who delivered a rambling, barely coherent 70-minute speech on Wednesday in which he discussed his relationship with Newsom.
Referring to his relationship with the California governor in the past tense, Trump said that he “had” a great relationship with Newsom during the fires that ravaged the Pacific Palisades in January 2025.
“We’re going to help the people in California. We want to have no crime,” Trump said. “I know Gavin was here. I used to get along so great with Gavin when I was president.”
Continuing, Trump said, “Gavin’s a good guy, and we’re going to. If he needed it, I would do it in a heartbeat. I’d love to see—we did help them a lot in Los Angeles, a lot with the early, early in my term, when they had some problems, but we would love to do it.”
Speaking with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins after Trump had concluded, Newsom described the speech as “remarkably boring” and “remarkably insignificant,” adding, “Honestly, I was a little disappointed, I was a little nonplussed.”
Newsom later posted on social media that USA House, the official U.S. pavilion at Davos, had denied him entry after being pressured by the Trump administration.
“Under pressure from the White House and State Department, USA House (a church acting as the official US pavilion) is now denying entry to @CAGovernor Gavin Newsom to speak with media after Fortune — the official media partner — invited him to speak,” Newsom’s press office wrote on X.
“California was just denied at the USA House,” Newsom wrote on his own X account. “Last we checked, California is part of USA.”
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly denied Newsom’s accusations in a statement to the Daily Beast, saying, “No one in Davos knows who third-rate governor Newscum is or why he is frolicking around Switzerland instead of fixing the many problems he created in California.”
In a private text message obtained by Politico, a USA House representative denied that Newsom had been uninvited and that the governor was still welcome at the venue.
Newsom, an outspoken critic of the Trump White House who has already emerged as the frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, has not shied away from making his feelings on senior Trump officials like Miller known.
“He’s about cruelty and chaos,” Newsom said of Miller in an interview last month, adding that he had “nothing good to say” about Miller.
“I don’t know what his motivations are, but the one thing all his actions have in common is cruelty.”
