Brown is the former speaker of the California Assembly and former mayor of San Francisco. Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor in San Francisco.
Mail-in voting is underway for California's Sept. 14 special recall election. It's a horse race with surveys showing the incumbent, Gov. Gavin Newsom, with a bit of a lead. But polling in recent years has been really far off.
The recall is clearly not what observers have called the Jan. 6 events in Washington, D.C. – an attempted "coup" to overturn an election. But everyone should see the recall for what it is: an effort to do what cannot be done in a general election, namely putting someone in office with far less than 50 percent of the votes cast.
Nice work if you can get it!
Here are four reasons why the recall is an anti-democratic ruse.
1. The rules favor those who want to upset the apple cart of democracy.
None of the 46 candidates running to replace Newsom has to win half the votes. Only the first question on the ballot requires majority approval: Should Newsom be recalled? Opposing the recall requires a "No" vote. If a majority of voters answer "Yes," the candidate with the most votes becomes governor, even if they garner only 25 percent support. Or less.
2. The folks behind it can't win the normal way.
Most of the 46 candidates to replace Newsom, a Democrat, are Republicans. John Cox, who lost to Newsom for governor in 2018, has pumped at least $5 million into TV ad-buys to support the recall and his current candidacy.
Unsuccessful Republican candidates for Congress in Southern California led two of the three groups who initiated the recall.
Orrin Heatlie, a retired Yolo County sheriff's sergeant and leading recall proponent, describes himself as mainstream. But he has major support from the fringes, including the Proud Boys, the militant group whose members are charged with assaulting Capitol Police on Jan. 6.
Heatlie had a 2019 Facebook post that read: "Microchip all illegal immigrants. It works! Just ask Animal control." He has since walked it back as not intended to be taken literally.
On that front, leading Republican candidate Larry Elder mentored Donald Trump's feverish anti-immigration guru, Stephen Miller, and in 2016 emailed him: "I hope to live to see when you are elected President."
3. Millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent on an election that would have happened the right way a year later.
Seven of 10 California voters say it's a waste to spend the estimated $215 million that the special election will cost taxpayers. Newsom would need to face voters in November 2022 anyway if he wants a second term.
Most voters would limit recalls to situations where a governor committed a crime or engaged in indisputably unethical conduct. Newsom did neither. His misstep that energized this recall's backers was his visit to a luxury restaurant during severe Covid restrictions.
Bad optics, for sure, but not a crime or unethical. A vote against the recall would send a message that Californians think the $215 million was misspent and that recall elections should be limited to special circumstances.
4. It could be a stealth way to shift power in the federal government.
We're all vulnerable to accident or illness, including U.S. senators. If a Republican becomes governor through the recall, and a new senator were needed before November 2022, a Republican appointee would swing the chamber to a GOP majority, completely changing control of Congress' legislative branch. Mitch McConnell would be re-anointed majority leader.
That could occur legitimately, of course, if the country votes in 2022 for more Republican Senate candidates than Democratic candidates. But democracy would be undermined if that result were to follow from substantially less than half of California's voters selecting the winning candidate for governor.
The recall can be justified only as a partisan maneuver. Every vote counts, for California and for the nation.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.