Donald Trump remade the GOP in his image. Chris Sununu doesn’t think it’ll stick.

That’s because the outgoing Republican governor of New Hampshire, who routinely oscillates between supporting Trump and criticizing him, believes his party is bigger than both its enduring standard bearer and the political movement he created.

“Trump is extremely unique. There's no ‘Trump lite’ or ‘Trump 2.0’ that can replace or replicate what he's brought to the table, for better or for worse,” Sununu said in an interview.

And the GOP, he insists, is still a “big tent,” ticking off varied constituencies like the Log Cabin Republicans, fiscal hawks, libertarian-leaners and social conservatives.

Sununu needs this to be true, at least if he wants a future in politics beyond punditry. The scion of a New Hampshire political dynasty whose old-school brand of Republicanism has been supplanted by hard-liners and flamethrowers in the Trump era, Sununu has been thrice reelected and consistently ranked as one of the nation’s most popular governors — even as he sometimes defies his party’s Trumpian bent.

Yet Sununu, who declined to seek a fifth term, has a mixed track record of translating his success in navigating a MAGA-fied GOP to other like-minded politicians. This year alone, he helped elect former Sen. Kelly Ayotte as his successor but failed to get former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley across the finish line in the Granite State’s GOP presidential primary. And he has no obvious constituency outside of New England should he seek higher office himself.

Sununu, 50, who passed on a Senate run in 2022 and a presidential bid in 2024, insists he’s not looking at either office for at least the next few years. Instead, he says he’s content to return to the private sector and, as he often notes, “make some money.”

As he prepares to hand over the office he’s held for eight years, Sununu spoke at length with POLITICO about his efforts to reduce opioid overdose deaths, how he plans to stay involved in politics, why he’s still largely against legalizing recreational marijuana and how Trump doesn’t have the GOP in as much of a vise grip as it seems.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

What would you say is your biggest policy achievement as governor?

When I first ran for governor, the two big issues facing the state were obviously the opioid epidemic and the mental health crisis. And we just jumped right in. We really focused on rural access to care and reinvented recovery-friendly workplace programs. It was really about opening up access.

Trump has talked a lot about trying to stop the flow of fentanyl, an opioid, over the southern border. Do you think the policies he’s proposing can help do that?

The No. 1 problem with the fentanyl crisis is the open border. Closing up the border definitely makes it harder for that stuff to come in.

How do you want to see Trump and Republicans in Congress tackle the border? There was a plan on the table last year…

That plan was terrible. The key to all of this is closing the border, but making the ports of entry much more robust to handle the number of people who may want to come across in a legal and authorized and processed way. And, most importantly, the “Remain in Mexico” policy has to be reinstated. Aside from closing the illegal crossings at the border, you need to have immigration reform that deals with creating a more modernized pathway for folks to become citizens the right way.

Trump’s plans for larger-scale deportations, do you think that’s the right way to go?

Specifically for criminals, yes. These are the first folks that should absolutely be deported. Beyond that Congress and the president can kind of tackle the next phase, but I think it does have to be broken in phases.

Back to New Hampshire for a minute. I want to talk about cannabis. You’ve largely been a skeptic of legalizing recreational marijuana, which failed again this year in the state Legislature. Why should New Hampshire miss out on tax revenues from this when all the surrounding states provide access to it?

You should never legalize drugs for the money. That's awful. If you're legalizing marijuana because you need more money, then you have a horribly malfunctioning state. So there's an ethics and a health issue here. I can tell you virtually every one of the governors [in the surrounding New England states] has indicated to me various problems with the legalization of marijuana, whether it's the exacerbated mental health issues, whether it's the black market that it fundamentally creates, whether it's the advertising problems, the proximity to schools that creates a lot of problems for parents. There's so many reasons not to do it. If you were going to do it here, [you would need to do so in a] responsible and controlled way that keeps it away from kids and allows the state to control the marketing messaging. I was semi-open to it if it could be controlled in the right way.

Before the election, we spoke about abortion and how Democrats were running hard on the issue in New Hampshire. You said the issue was losing salience and that voters were more concerned with the economy. The Republican won the governor’s race, so what is your assessment now?

In 2022, Roe v. Wade had just happened; it was much more of an unknown issue. This time around, two more years have passed. People in New Hampshire — no one’s denied an abortion, no one’s denied their rights [the state restricts abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions]. So the fearmongering hasn’t borne true. There are some individual states and places that are more restrictive or less restrictive, but that’s up to voters [in those states] to decide. It’ll still be an issue, but it's just not going to be the political backbreaker issue that the Democrats want it to be.

Do you think that there's still room within the Republican Party for criticism of Trump when warranted?

Of course there is. Did [former Rep.] Matt Gaetz just get pushed right out of his nomination to be the U.S. attorney general? Yes. Look, it's never easy criticizing the president and the standard bearer of your party, and there's always that kind of political honeymoon period that happens when you first get elected. But there are already signs of folks that are willing to push back and criticize and say no when they feel like they have to say no. And that should give the American people a big sigh of relief that it’s not the evil dictatorship that the liberal media was telling us it was going to be.

Trump is term-limited. So that opens up the question of what happens in 2028. Do you think Vice President-elect and Ohio Sen. JD Vance has a lock on the nomination in ‘28? Or do you think there will be a real, contested primary?

There’ll definitely be a real, contested primary. I think JD is great, by the way. He's shown himself to have overcome a lot of the early criticisms that he [faced]. He's competent. He's incredibly smart on his feet. He knows the issues. He's very cordial. He gets along with the other side — that was shown through the vice presidential debate, and I think that gave strength to the entire ticket. So there's no doubt he's in a great position if he wanted to run in ‘28. But no one's going to just hand it to him. You’ve got to bring him through his paces. I imagine if he wanted to be a front-runner, he would be. But no, you're gonna have a lot of folks from all walks of life running.

You know I’m going to ask if you’re thinking about it.

No. Not for ’28, I’m definitely not thinking about it.

So are you ruling out a presidential run in 2028?

I don't rule anything out, but there's no story there. It’s literally zero on my list in terms of thinking about anything. I can't see myself running in 2028. That would be, holy cow, that would be a real change of my plans. I don't see any path to that actually happening. I'm excited to go back to the private sector.

So what are your plans? What’s next for you?

I’m going to enter the private sector and make some money, do some business-type stuff, but I'll also be in the media a bit. I have some ideas to keep myself kind of scratching the political itch through various venues in the media and content creation around smart political content.

You’ve been making a push to support Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s plans for the “Department of Government Efficiency.” Tell me how that can work.

You can really look to the states to get ideas. Musk has to use — even though he’s an outsider, he has political capital — he needs to use it and make sure he’s not just putting a list of good ideas in front of Congress, a Republican Congress that is typically tepid about actually doing anything substantive. Congress just can’t help themselves about overspending, Republicans included. So he and Trump could use their combined political capital to ensure that whatever they do is lasting. It would be a huge legacy initiative for them. You gotta really push Congress to dig in for a balanced budget of some sort. Ultimately, they're going to have to start talking about entitlement reforms or Social Security reforms that just have to come because we have the bills coming due.

Trump wants to end daylight saving time. You said in a recent op-ed that you support that. But the current push in Congress is to make daylight saving time permanent. What’s your thinking on that? 

I don't care whether you make it permanent or you get rid of it, but let's stop changing the clock, right? That's my point. I don't care. Pick an hour. You get the exact same thing, whether you make it permanent or get rid [it]. The whole point is, let's stop changing the clock.

© Rod Lamkey for POLITICO

Donald Trump is getting a rude awakening that his grip on the GOP isn’t absolute.

Over the past 48 hours, 38 House Republicans rejected the stopgap spending bill that the president-elect publicly threw his weight behind after tanking Speaker Mike Johnson’s original proposal to keep the federal government running past Friday. Their defiance came even as Trump and his allies threatened to field primary challenges against GOP members who didn’t fall in line.

Then, on Friday night and early Saturday, the House and Senate passed a different version of the spending plan — one that didn’t include Trump’s demand to extend or end the debt limit.

It’s the latest example of Trump confronting the limits of his power, especially over his own party. Senate Republicans already dealt Trump a massive blow when a handful of them made clear they wouldn’t support Trump’s first choice for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, leading to him withdrawing. And that was after they chose John Thune over Rick Scott for Senate GOP leader against the wishes of Trump’s allies.

Taken together, rank-and-file Hill Republicans’ early rebuffs of Trump show the party is far from total lock-step with the president-elect.

“For a long time there were always calls for ‘who in the Republican Party will ever stand up to Trump?’ And now we certainly have it. But it may not be in an ideal way,” said Matthew Bartlett, a GOP strategist and appointee in Trump’s first administration.

“This is an inflection point: How Trump responds from outside the caucus, how he deals with those who are not ready to make deals … this is really just prepping the battlefield and testing the waters for the next four years to come,” Bartlett said.

Trump’s push to get Republicans to accede to his demands ran headlong into longstanding GOP resistance to suspending the debt ceiling. Doing that is a huge ask of fiscal conservatives, and viewed through that lens, it’s unsurprising that the bill went down.

While Trump had hailed the reworked deal as “SUCCESS in Washington” and urged “All Republicans, and even the Democrats” to vote for the bill that he called “VITAL to the America First Agenda,” some in his party broke rank.

“Republicans campaigned on cutting spending and reducing the $35 trillion national debt. You can't achieve that by suspending the debt limit,” Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) wrote on X on Thursday. “Until President-elect Trump takes office, I won't grant Joe Biden an extension on an unlimited debt ceiling.”

Rep. Greg Lopez (R-Colo.), another Republican who opposed the bill Thursday, said in a statement that he could not back a continuing resolution “that does not consider our nation's growing $36 trillion debt and removes the debt ceiling, creating an open check book for Congress to spend more money it already doesn't have.”

And Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.) said on X that “ending reckless spending and tackling the national debt immediately” is what will allow Trump to “shake up the status quo.”

“I understand President Trump’s concern that a debt ceiling fight will delay the implementation of his agenda but to Make America Great Again, we have to end business as usual in Washington right here, right now,” McCormick wrote.

Their resistance is an early indicator of areas in which Republicans are willing to break with Trump on policy — and a warning sign that while the incoming president has enjoyed broad sway over Johnson, that influence may not extend to every member in the party’s rank-and-file on every vote. And with such a slim majority in the House, the defiance of just a few Republicans can have an impact.

“We talk about MAGA, Freedom Caucus, etc., but there’s a sizable chunk of the conference that are OG Tea Partiers,” said Doug Heye, a GOP strategist and Hill alum. “Raising the debt ceiling tests the boundaries of what is otherwise an enormous influence over the party.”

A person close to Trump, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, characterized the outcome as a win for the president-elect because it showed the whip count within the caucus and “eliminated a bunch of the pork.”

And Johnson, speaking to reporters after the House vote, signaled that Trump was on board with the reworked spending plan. Johnson was in “constant contact” with Trump, he said, and the president-elect “knew exactly what we were doing and why.”

But Trump has been prodding Johnson to deal with the debt ceiling for over a month, the person close to the incoming president said. And in the hours after his preferred deal went down in flames, he began advocating to push out the debt ceiling even further — to 2029.

The spending debacle has left some Republicans concerned that, like in his first term, Trump may not be able to get as much done as hoped because, they say, he is focused on the wrong things.

One person close to Trump, who was granted anonymity to speak frankly, worried the president-elect’s decision to use his political capital to unsuccessfully try to pass a new funding bill suspending the debt ceiling could echo back to his failed attempts to kill Obamacare early in his first term — instead of pursuing a more popular policy such as an infrastructure overhaul.

“I’m hoping we’re not in that same spot right here,” the person said.

© Evan Vucci/AP

Democratic attorneys general are preparing a raft of legal actions to prevent Donald Trump from carrying out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, setting the stage for a series of showdowns over one of his central campaign pledges.

In interviews with POLITICO, six leading blue-state prosecutors said they are girding to take Trump to court over misusing military troops on domestic soil, attempting to commandeer local or state law enforcement to do the job of the federal government and denying people’s constitutional right to due process.

The attorneys general also said they would move to challenge Trump if he tries to federalize the National Guard — or attempts to direct active-duty military units or National Guard troops from red states into blue states. They are bracing to push back against his administration sending immigration agents into schools and hospitals to target vulnerable populations.

And they are preparing to fight Trump over withholding federal funding from local law enforcement agencies in an attempt to induce them into carrying out deportations, as he did unsuccessfully in his first term.

The attorneys’ preparations underscore the depth of concern among blue-state leaders about Trump’s deportation plans and foreshadow the major role state prosecutors will continue to play in shaping the country’s immigration policy. Following a rash of red-state challenges to President Joe Biden’s immigration agenda over the last four years, it’s now blue-state attorneys who are positioned to set off another round of legal clashes — this time intended to stymie Trump on his signature issue.

“There are ways to [handle immigration] that are in line with American values and conform to American law. But they don’t seem to be interested in pursuing that,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, a former federal prosecutor who has experience in immigration enforcement, said of Trump and his allies. “And that’s where someone like me has an important role to play.”

MOVES AND COUNTERMOVES

While some have dismissed Trump’s pledge to carry out the largest deportation in American history as infeasible, Democratic attorneys general are taking the incoming president at his word. They are preparing briefs and analyses and even identifying courts in which to file their lawsuits as they brace for him to begin rounding up undocumented immigrants, who number some 11 million, en masse.

It is setting up a legal chess match between a president-elect looking for new ways to press the limits of executive power and a cadre of state prosecutors already familiar with his playbook and adapting to changes in his approach. And it is unfolding amid broader shifts in the politics of border security.

The incoming president’s policy team is already thinking about how to craft executive actions aimed to withstand the legal challenges from groups and state prosecutors — all in hopes of avoiding an early defeat like the one that shuttered his 2017 travel ban targeting majority-Muslim nations.

But each step Trump takes during his transition — stacking his Cabinet with immigration hardliners who have pledged to carry out his calls for large-scale deportations, and confirming he intends to both declare a national emergency and use the military in some form to aid his plans — gives Democrats more clues about how to attempt to block his efforts once he takes office.

Trump pledged on the campaign trail to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expedite the removal of immigrant gang members. He is expected to end parole for people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, and deactivate a mobile phone application called CBP One that migrants could use to set up appointments to seek asylum.

His border-czar-in-waiting, former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Tom Homan, has vowed to ramp up workplace raids. His incoming deputy chief of policy, Stephen Miller, has spoken of deputizing the National Guard as immigration enforcement officers and even sending troops across state lines to circumvent any resistance efforts. While federal law largely prohibits using military forces for domestic law enforcement, Miller last year identified a workaround — the clause in the so-called Insurrection Act that gives the president power to deploy the military on domestic soil in times of turmoil.

And on Monday, Trump confirmed in a social media post that he intends to declare a national emergency and marshal military assets to help execute deportations.

State prosecutors argued in interviews that those plans are on shaky legal ground. And talk of using the military has already spurred policy divides between the incoming president and Republican lawmakers, with libertarian-leaning GOP Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) saying this week that Trump’s plan to carry out mass deportations with the military’s help would be a “huge mistake” — an early sign that Democrats might have some allies on this front.

“I don’t think the theories that they have comport with federal laws, so there would be a direct challenge to the legal basis the president would use to deploy the United States military,” Torrez said.

“Separate and apart from the legal arguments that we would be advancing in court, I think there’s a broader context that most Americans are simply not comfortable and do not support utilizing military assets in that way,” Torrez added.

WHERE TO PUSH BACK — OR NOT

Attorneys general aren’t planning to stand in the way of lawful immigration enforcement. In many cases they will work with federal authorities to address public safety threats and to help catch and deport criminals — as they have in the past. And even as they prepare for what they cast as potential overreach from a second Trump administration, they note that their next steps largely depend on how the president-elect implements his plans, which is difficult to predict.

Trump’s advisers have suggested the Republican administration will take a more “targeted” approach to deportations, starting with those who are known or suspected national security threats and who have criminal records. But attorneys general are skeptical he will stick to that. And they are fearful he could begin targeting both undocumented immigrants who have been in the country for a decade or more and have established roots, or those who entered the country through legal pathways — scenarios they warn could lead to family separation and cause chaos in some communities.

“If he’s going to want to achieve that type of scale, the largest deportation in U.S. history, as he says, by definition he’s going to have to target people who are lawfully here and … go after American citizens,” New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin said. “And we’re not going to stand for that.”

Trump pledged on the campaign trail to begin his deportation push in Aurora, Colorado, the Denver suburb he routinely depicted — despite pushback from locals — as a “war zone” that had been “invaded and conquered” by members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Phil Weiser, the state’s attorney general, said he will be “laser-focused” on determining whether Trump’s immigration officials are denying people due process — a move he called “unAmerican.”

Attorneys general from Colorado to California are also preparing for repeat battles over federal funding. Trump threatened throughout his first term to withhold funding from states and cities with so-called sanctuary policies that limit local law enforcement’s interactions with federal immigration authorities. His administration also attempted to attach immigration-enforcement conditions to grants for local law enforcement — and lost in court.

“We won’t take that lying down, just as we didn’t last time,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said.

In response to a request for comment for this story, Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director, said in a statement that the president-elect has “nominated the most highly qualified and experienced attorneys to lead the Department of Justice” and “focus on enforcing the rule of law.”

Democratic prosecutors’ resistance will extend beyond the courtroom. Advocacy groups such as the ACLU are already pushing attorneys general to use other tools at their disposal — such as issuing guidance to state and local agencies about how to handle immigration requests from the federal government — to attempt to slow implementation of Trump’s immigration actions.

And attorneys general are already embarking on a messaging campaign both against Trump’s broad characterizations of migrants as “blood thirsty” criminals and in support of immigrants who are contributing to local communities. They are also joining other Democratic leaders in starting to cast Trump’s deportation plans as potentially harmful for the economy he has pledged to improve, drawing a direct line between the immigrant workforce that helps drive the nation’s agriculture industry and higher prices at the grocery store.

Trump has created the narrative “that every immigrant who is here in, say, Massachusetts, or this country, illegally is committing crimes,” said the state’s attorney general, Andrea Campbell. “It’s just not true.”

Shia Kapos and Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.

© Damian Dovarganes/AP

Donald Trump pledged in one of his final campaign speeches to work with Democratic mayors and governors if reelected. But just hours after the former president was projected to win back the White House, some blue-state leaders were actively plotting against him.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, one of Trump’s fiercest critics, on Thursday called a special legislative session to funnel more resources toward the state’s legal defenses to preemptively combat Republican policies around immigration, the environment, LGBTQ+ rights and reproductive care.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James — one of Trump’s most aggressive first-term adversaries — pledged to beef up coordination between their offices to “protect New Yorkers’ fundamental freedoms from any potential threats.”

And attorneys general across blue states are prepared to take Trump to court — just as their predecessors did hundreds of times during his first administration.

If Trump’s reelection represented a realignment in American politics, blue-state leaders are choosing to confront it with a return to form, resuming the counterweight roles they played during his first administration as their party reckons with a nationwide repudiation.

“We've been talking for months with attorneys general throughout the nation, preparing, planning, strategizing for the possibility of this day,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a press conference in San Francisco on Thursday.

Trump’s two-year campaign to retake the White House — and polls that for months showed he could succeed — gave Democrats the lead time they lacked in 2016 to shore up their defenses against conservative policies. And they are using as a guide his campaign-trail calls for mass deportations and regulatory rollbacks, as well as Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for a Republican administration that Trump has distanced himself from but that dozens of his former administration officials had a hand in crafting.

Governors and lawmakers in several blue states have already passed laws bolstering reproductive rights since the fall of Roe and stockpiled the abortion pill mifepristone in response to further legal threats to reproductive care. While Trump has vowed to veto a national abortion ban, that’s hardly alleviated Democrats’ fears. And as he barreled toward a second term, they raced to address other areas of concern, pushing ballot measures to protect same-sex marriage, labor rights and other liberal causes.

Even as he briefly pledged in the closing days of his campaign to work across the aisle, Trump has also vowed to punish his political opponents — and many blue-state leaders are at the top of his list of adversaries. On Friday, the president-elect tore into Newsom for calling a special legislative session.

“Governor Gavin Newscum is trying to KILL our Nation’s beautiful California,” Trump said Friday in a post on Truth Social, using his derisive nickname for the governor. “He is using the term ‘Trump-Proof’ as a way of stopping all of the GREAT things that can be done to ‘Make California Great Again.’”

And so Democratic governors and attorneys general who have spent months strategizing on how to protect their states’ progressive policies from a possible second Trump term are kicking those efforts into higher gear.

Some governors are discussing how to ensure that federal funding for state projects makes it to their coffers before Trump takes power, potentially with total Republican control of Congress, said one person who works in a Democratic governor’s office, granted anonymity to disclose private conversations. The discussions convey the concerns among some Democrats that Republicans could pause disbursements from, or even repeal, President Joe Biden’s signature programs, such as the CHIPS and Inflation Reduction acts.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker also said Thursday that he has spoken with other Democratic governors since the election about how to best Trump-proof their states.

“There are many people whose lives and livelihoods are at risk, and there are many people who cried at the [election] result because they know what impact it may have on their families,” Pritzker said at a press conference Thursday.

He also delivered a warning: "You come for my people, you come through me.”

In California, where Democratic leaders became some of the de facto heads of the Trump resistance after his 2016 election, officials spent months working to shore up the state’s climate policies and disaster preparedness in anticipation of an antagonistic federal government even before Newsom called the special legislative session.

“The freedoms we hold dear in California are under attack,” Newsom declared in a statement. “And we won’t sit idle.”

In New York, Hochul and James created the Empire State Freedom Initiative, a program that is meant to address “policy and regulatory threats” from the incoming Trump administration, including against reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights, as well as gun safety and environmental justice. The New York governor also signaled she will propose legislation as well as take executive action in response to Trump’s victory, but did not provide specifics.

“New York will remain a bastion for freedom and rule of law,” Hochul said. “I'll do everything in my power to ensure that New York remains a bastion from efforts where those rights are being denied in other states.”

James could have an outsize impact on how Trump’s policies trickle down to New York. The Democrat, who was first elected in 2018, sued Trump’s real estate business for fraud. She won a $450 million judgment, which is being appealed.

Meanwhile, state prosecutors who often served as the first line of defense against Trump’s most controversial executive orders in his last term — banding together to try to block his travel restrictions from some Muslim-majority countries, challenge his plans to roll back vehicle emissions standards, and more — have long been preparing to again serve as a legal bulwark.

In California, state lawyers have meticulously prepared for Trump’s return — down to crafting draft briefings, weighing specific legal arguments and debating favorable litigation venues, Bonta, the attorney general, told POLITICO.

“If he comes into office and he follows the law and he doesn't violate the constitution and he doesn't violate other important laws, like the Administrative Procedure Act he violated all the time last time, then there's nothing for us to do,” Bonta said. “But if he violates the law, as he has said he would, as Project 2025 says he will, then we are ready. … We have gone down to the detail of: What court do we file in?”

In New Jersey, state Attorney General Matt Platkin cited mass deportations, an “aggressive reading of the Comstock Act” to potentially impose an abortion ban and "gutting clean water protection" as potential sources of litigation.

“If you look at the things that have been said by the president and his associates during the campaign, … if you read Project 2025, there are proposals that are clearly unlawful and that would undermine the rights of our residents,” Platkin said in an interview.

And in Massachusetts, first-term Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office has been preparing to act against threats to reproductive, LGBTQ+ and immigrants' rights and student loan-forgiveness programs, among other areas.

In response to a request for comment, Trump’s team said in a statement: “The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver.”

Democrats’ rush to reform their resistance to Trump is partly self-serving. Governors and state prosecutors who took on Trump during his first term burnished their national profiles in the process.

In some cases they were able to parlay their opposition into higher office: Massachusetts’ Maura Healey leveraged her lawsuits against Trump as attorney general to help win the governorship in 2022; California’s Xavier Becerra, the former state attorney general, is now the Biden administration’s Health and Human Services secretary and is eyeing a run for governor. And for Democrats who’ve been chafing for a chance to get off the party’s deep bench, a second Trump term presents a fresh opportunity for a potentially star-making turn ahead of an open 2028 presidential primary.

That jockeying has in some ways already begun. Several blue-state leaders held press conferences on Wednesday and Thursday to reassure anxious constituents that doubled as ways to establish themselves as leaders in the anti-Trump fight. On Wednesday, Healey was on MSNBC vowing that state police would not be involved in carrying out the mass deportations Trump has promised, seizing a national platform in a way she rarely has since challenging Trump in the courtroom as attorney general.

But there was some acknowledgment among top city and state Democrats that they would have to find ways to work with Trump, too — mainly on infrastructure projects which are often reliant on massive amounts of federal funding.

“If it's contrary to our values, we will fight to the death,” New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said during a Wednesday press conference about the election results. “If there’s an opportunity for common ground, we will seize that as fast as anybody.”

New York City Mayor Eric Adams similarly pledged to find ways to partner with the incoming administration, naming infrastructure as a target area for future collaboration.

“I communicated with the president yesterday to state that there are many issues here in the city that we want to work together with the administration to address,” Adams said during a news conference Thursday. “The city must move forward.”

Holly Otterbein, Melanie Mason, Nick Reisman, Daniel Han, Maya Kaufman, Shia Kapos and Kelly Garrity contributed to this report.

© Evan Vucci/AP