Gavin Newsom Is Setting His Own Rules
Let’s get this out of the way: He is embarrassingly handsome, his hair seasoned with silver, at ease with his own eminence as he delivers his final State of the State address. “In Washington, the president believes that might makes right,” pronounces California governor Gavin Newsom. “Secret police, businesses raided, windows smashed, citizens detained, citizens shot, masked men snatching people in broad daylight….” His tone is temperate, but the words echo through the State Capitol’s Assembly chamber, the august backdrop for his speech. “Lining the pockets of the rich; crony capitalism at an unimaginable scale,” he goes on. “Rolling back rights…. Rewriting history.” Newsom shakes his head, seeming more mournful than angry. Seeming, yes, presidential. “None of this is normal.”
It must drive Trump nuts. Newsom: lithe, ardent, energetic, a glimmer of optimism in his eye; Kennedy-esque. Add to that his stunning wife and four adorable kids, and the executive strut of a self-made millionaire who has spent the past seven years at the helm of a state big, complex, and rich enough to be a nation of its own. Then there’s the stuff Newsom has been doing. Forcing the president to backtrack on deploying the National Guard to Los Angeles. Parrying the GOP’s Texas redistricting coup with Prop 50, the recently passed ballot measure that could flip up to five of California’s House seats to the Democrats. Those tweets, or whatever they’re called now: “FOX HATES THAT I AM AMERICA’S MOST FAVORITE GOVERNOR (“RATINGS KING”) SAVING AMERICA – WHILE TRUMP CAN’T EVEN CONQUER THE “BIG” STAIRS ON AIR FORCE ONE ANYMORE!!! …THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER. – GCN.” There’s a photo that does the online rounds now and then, a shot of the governor on the tarmac at LAX, aiming his finger at the president’s chest. Bouncer body language, like, Hey buddy, not so fast. It has seemed at times, this past year, that the only thing standing athwart Donald Trump’s will to power is Gavin Newsom. They make good foils: Both are masters of modern media; both, in their own way, know how to star in The Politics Show.
Whatever you do, keep people talking. Commenting, forwarding, debating, dissecting. We’re all part of the show, and it’s always on. “Newsom gets this,” notes MS NOW All In host Chris Hayes, who writes about the warping of politics by the attention economy in his recent book The Sirens’ Call. “He has a useful shamelessness in courting attention—which is part of Trump’s power.”
Newsom’s latest conversation-starter is his new memoir, Young Man in a Hurry. It’s not a manifesto, per se. You do come away with a hazy sense of Newsom’s politics—canny smudging, given his all-but-announced 2028 presidential run. The book sets him up as someone who fights, someone who dreams big, someone who sweats the details, someone with a desire to serve. These are not fixed ideological points; they leave room to maneuver. What the memoir mainly does is reassure you that Gavin Newsom is a person with frailties and failings. A man who had to search for himself. “When language eludes you, identity eludes you, too. You start trying on costumes to see if they’ll fit,” he writes of his childhood struggles with undiagnosed dyslexia, one source of his confusion about who he was and where he fit in the world. Newsom became, by his own definition, a poser. Discussing the book, he paraphrases Oscar Wilde. “What’s the quote? ‘First you pose, then.…’ ” he shrugs demonstratively: Who knows? As in, who knows where you’ll go once you’ve peered behind your own mask. Which, in writing this book, Newsom says, is what he set out to do.
