Cal­i­for­nia Gov­er­nor Gavin New­som is­sued a force­ful warn­ing about the state of Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy, say­ing the Unit­ed States is at risk of aban­don­ing long-stand­ing de­mo­c­ra­t­ic norms and le­gal process­es.

In a press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day evening at COP30 in Belem, Brazil, Guardian Me­dia’s Ryan Ba­choo asked the gov­er­nor for a re­sponse to the Unit­ed King­dom sus­pend­ing “some in­tel­li­gence” to the Unit­ed States amid the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion’s bomb­ing of ves­sels off the coast of Venezuela.

New­som said his coun­try was fac­ing a piv­otal mo­ment as Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump con­tin­ues to ex­ert po­lit­i­cal in­flu­ence.

“What hap­pened to due process? What hap­pened to the rule of law?” New­som asked. He em­pha­sised that gov­er­nance must fol­low le­gal struc­tures and ac­count­abil­i­ty. “I’m a lit­tle old-fash­ioned. It’s not ‘ready, fire, aim.’ It’s ‘ready, aim, fire.’ I be­lieve in the rule of law. I don’t be­lieve in the rule of Don, D-O-N,” he said.

New­som point­ed to re­cent US op­er­a­tions, in­clud­ing the de­struc­tion of ves­sels at sea, which he said oc­curred with­out clear con­sul­ta­tion or ap­proval from Con­gress. “It’s chill­ing to me to see those scenes … with brief­in­gs that are laugh­able, and mem­bers of Con­gress, both the House and the Sen­ate, in­clud­ing Re­pub­li­cans, have crit­i­cised,” he said. “If you can’t crit­i­cise that, what the hell can you crit­i­cise?”

His com­ments came as the USS Ger­ald R Ford ar­rived in the Caribbean wa­ters to bol­ster the US cam­paign against al­leged drug traf­fick­ing in the re­gion.

New­som urged in­ter­na­tion­al part­ners to pay at­ten­tion to the in­ter­nal po­lit­i­cal strug­gle un­fold­ing in the Unit­ed States. He said the mo­ment is crit­i­cal for pre­serv­ing the coun­try’s role as a de­mo­c­ra­t­ic mod­el. “This is our coun­try. The Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca should be a mod­el for the rest of the world,” he said. “This is a pre­cious mo­ment in our re­pub­lic, and I feel it needs to be called out.”