Arnold Schwarzenegger Prepares to Challenge Gavin Newsom | Vanity Fair

In these divided times, Californians of both stripes have been comforted by how readily its most recent Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and current Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom have come together—especially when it came to standing up to (Republican, as if you didn’t know) President Donald Trump. But that Golden State alliance ended this week, after Newsom announced a plan to redistrict California in response to a Trump-inspired gerrymandering scheme in Texas.

For months now, Trump’s team has been lobbying GOP lawmakers and governors to redraw state maps to ensure a Republican House majority in the 2026 midterm elections. In Indiana, for example, Trump asked Gov. Mike Braun to call for a special legislative session to redistrict the Hoosier state, even sending Vice President JD Vance to implore leaders to convene.

Braun—who Trump relegated to the kids’ table during his star-studded inauguration—has yet to make a decision on the matter, but his counterpart in Texas, Greg Abbott, is all in on the plan, with a special redistricting session planned for this week that could net the GOP five more House seats.

ICE agents march to LA's Edward R. Roybal Federal Building after a show of force outside Gov. Gavin Newsom's Thursday, Aug 14 press conference in support of a special election to redistrict California.

In response, Newsom announced his own redistricting proposal Thursday, saying via X that he will call a special election “to redraw our Congressional maps and defend fair representation.” At a press conference on Thursday to promote the November 4 vote, Newsom explained that redrawing California’s electoral map would generate five Democratic house seats, effectively negating any Texas gains. It’s a move that the state must make “in reaction to a president of the United States that called a sitting governor of the state of Texas and said ‘find me five seats,’” Newsom said.

“I know they say don’t mess with Texas. Well, don’t mess with the great Golden State,” Newsom said, even as Trump appeared to do just that: Armed and masked ICE agents assembled just outside Newsom’s press event to promote the redistricting effort, a show of force that LA Mayor Karen Bass described as “completely unacceptable” and Newsom pointed to as proof that California’s redistricting is the only way forward. The ICE agents’ presence was “pretty sick and pathetic,” Newsom told reporters, describing it as everything one needs to know “about Donald Trump’s America.”

That scene must have sent chills down the spine of Newsom’s fellow Californian, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Terminator star, who had Newsom’s current job from November 17, 2003, to January 3, 2011, was born shortly after World War II to a member of the Nazi party—a group that, under Trump, has experienced a significant revival. “My father was, and so many other millions of men were, sucked into a hate system through lies and deceit. And so, we have seen where that leads,” Schwarzenegger said in a 2023 interview.

THE WAY WE WERE: Then-California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom joke around at Schwarzenegger's ceremony to sign the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 to reduce greenhouse emissions. Though the GOP has threatened to roll back the many of the protections promised in that act, Schwarzenegger remains a member of the Republican party.

The former governor was so disgusted by Trump that he endorsed Kamala Harris for president in 2024, saying the convicted felon “will divide, he will insult, he will find new ways to be more un-American than he already has been, and we, the people, will get nothing but more anger.”

But in a somewhat cryptic Instagram post on Friday, Schwarzenegger suggested his willingness to oppose Trump only goes so far. In a photo taken at a gym, the former governor is seated at what appears to be an iso-lateral front lat pulldown machine, wearing a t-shirt that reads “F*** the politicians. Terminate gerrymandering.” Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff Daniel Ketchell tells Vanity Fair that the post was intended to communicate his distaste for any effort to redistrict, regardless of motive.

“Governor Schwarzenegger has a 20 year history of battling gerrymandering, taking power from the politicians and returning it to the people where it belongs, and he believes gerrymandering is evil no matter who does it,” Ketchell said via email.

“He still stands by the rule we learn in pre-school: two wrongs don’t make a right … He will continue to be on the side of the people and not politicians—from either party—on this issue.”

It’s a stance that Newsom’s camp finds deeply disappointing. “We agree with the former governor on the urgent need for national independent redistricting,” Courtni Pugh, an advisor to the California redistricting campaign, tells Vanity Fair via written statement. “But [we] fundamentally disagree on this moment of crisis.”

“Trump and his Texas cronies are trying to rig the 2026 election before a single person has voted,” Pugh continued. “This is a five alarm fire for our democracy.”

It’s unclear how hard Schwarzenegger will fight Newsom, or what form that opposition will take. Speaking with the New York Times, Schwarzenegger says that he won’t be aligning himself with the GOP as he moves forward against the current governor’s plan. “He was kind enough to let me know what he’s up to and how he feels,” the FUBAR star says of Newsom. “I told him: ‘I totally get it. I understand it.’ I said, ‘There’s no effect on our relationship.’”

But on this one issue, Schwarzenegger says, he must stand up to both his party and his state’s leader. “I hate the idea of the Republicans redrawing the district lines in Texas, as much as I hate what the Californians are trying to do,” he says. “But I’m thinking now about California, and about the people of California. I promised them that we are going to create a commission that would be independent of the politicians, and there will be an independent citizens’ commission drawing the lines. So I’m not going to go back on my promise. I’m going to fight for my promise.”

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