“Gavin Newsom this week declared himself the leader of a “nation-state”.
Speaking on MSNBC, the California governor on Tuesday announced his state would be amassing more than 200m medical-grade masks per month for health workers on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic. After weeks of competing with other states for critical medical equipment, in the absence of strategy and coordination from the federal government, Newsom said he had had enough. So he harnessed the bulk purchasing power of “the state of California as a nation-state” to spend nearly $1bn to work with non-profits and manufacturers to deliver masks for his constituents, and possibly other states.
The next morning, as #PresidentNewsom trended on Twitter, Newsom once again presented the state he leads as a global power. “We need to coordinate and organize our nation-state status,” he told reporters at his daily Covid-19 press briefing. California “has been a catalyst to increase supply that will not only avail itself to the state of California but more broadly across this country and potentially in other parts of the globe”, he added.”
