While President-elect Donald Trump was meeting with President Joe Biden at the White House on Wednesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom was just blocks away on Capitol Hill, meeting with his fellow Golden State Democrats to make sure they were on the same page before the Republican returns to power next year.

Exiting the Democrats' weekly lunch, Newsom said the group discussed the special session he had called for the state legislature and “how we're going to move aggressively, to be proactive and not reactive to the incoming Trump administration.”

“We talked about the playbook that's very familiar, that goes back even before Donald Trump, to the George W. Bush administration, as it relates to particularly issues relating to the environment and clean air that go back to Ronald Reagan,” the California Democrat said.

Back in September, Trump made the threat to withhold federal wildfire aid if elected during a news conference at his golf resort in California unless Newsom agreed to divert more water to farmers inland rather than allowing it to flow out to sea.

“If he doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put out all his fires,” Trump said at the time. “And if we don’t give him all the money to put out the fires, he’s got problems.”

When asked by Spectrum News about Trump’s threats to withhold federal aid for natural disasters such as wildfires if the Governor doesn’t back his policies, Newsom called it “pretty childish.”

Newsom was at the White House one day prior, meeting with President Joe Biden and other officials in his administration on a range of issues, from disaster funding to expanding health care access and clean air programs.

“I was with an American president yesterday at the Oval Office, and I was with an American president last week when I got a phone call from him saying he wanted to support our efforts on disaster recovery in Ventura, California that was suffering from a major wildfire and there was no conditions – he didn't ask me to change policy on water in order to support the American people in my home state,” said Newsom. “That's not the state of mind of Donald Trump, and it's not just rhetoric. It's not just threats. Those are actions by Donald Trump in the past, and I guess that's what people voted for. But I got to tell you, a lot of folks will be hurt if we don't push back, and so we're going to be firm.”

Newsom, a possible hopeful for the Democratic nomination in four years, stands to be in a prominent position as both an outspoken critic of the former president — now president-elect — and leader of the largest state in the nation. The California governor barnstormed the country over the course of the 2024 campaign, stumping for both President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as other down ballot Democratic candidates.

According to a report from Politico, Newsom convened a call with tens of thousands of people in his network of small donors and has a robust political operation at his disposal.