The hottest ticket in Brazil just might be a meeting with Gavin Newsom

Newsom couldn’t walk halfway down a hallway without fielding a meeting request from CEOs and NGOs — or a selfie request. One Brazilian picture-taker had him repeat the Portuguese word for “Let’s go": “Vamos.” His remarks to investors at the Milken Global Investors’ Symposium sounded more like a campaign rally than a business speech. “We have seen this complete reversal of so much of the progress that the Biden administration made,” he said. “What Trump is doing is unprecedented in American history ... This should not be through the lens or prism of red, in American vernacular, versus blue.” Then he held an hour-long roundtable meeting with representatives from major investment funds, philanthropies, development banks and energy leaders, who he said pushed him to bolster economic ties in existing voluntary agreements with Brazilian governments. Newsom told POLITICO he and his team were getting a “disproportionate number of calls” to meet on the sidelines of the talks, where the U.S. government’s delegation numbers zero (“not even a note taker,” Newsom said.) “We’re at peak influence because of the flatness of the surrounding terrain with the Trump administration and all the anxiety,” Newsom said in an interview in São Paulo. Newsom is playing a well-rehearsed role for California, which has staked out a leading role in international climate diplomacy for decades under both Democratic and Republican governors, including during Trump’s first term. The Trump administration’s dismantling of climate policies to favor oil and gas interests only give California more space to fill, said former Gov. Jerry Brown, who got a hero’s welcome himself at the United Nations climate talks in 2017, the first year of Trump 1.0. “Trump, he’s saying one thing,” Brown said in an interview. “Newsom is saying something else, very important.” The impact, he said, will be determined in Belém. “That’s why it’s exciting. There’s not an answer yet.” That gives Newsom an opening — and a risk. Where Brown led a coalition of states eager to demonstrate continued commitment on climate in Trump’s first term, Newsom will arrive in Belém, near the mouth of the Amazon River, at a time when U.S. politics are tilting rightward and even Democrats are pulling back on embracing climate policies.