Few in American politics are as desperate as California Gov. Gavin Newsom is right now.
Newsom, long considered — by himself, anyway — a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for president, has been positioning himself and repositioning himself to be next in line for years.
And this week, through the Los Angeles smog, he can see the prize on the horizon.
With L.A. the epicenter of immigration protests, the camera-loving gov isn’t just on the story, he’s made himself the story — just turn on any cable news outlet and you’re likely to see him there, taking on President Trump and his administration.
Or in a primetime televised address he’s calling “Democracy at a Crossroads.” Or on social media, where he’s uploading satirical responses to Trump from his official press office account, comparing him to “Star Wars” villain Emperor Palpatine in a pair of AI-generated TikToks.
Make no mistake, Newsom is relishing his moment in the spotlight, and he’s making the most of his brushes with Trump, who seems to know exactly who Newsom is.
After Trump border czar Tom Homan suggested Newsom be arrested (for what, who knows?) Trump responded, “I think it’s great. Gavin likes the publicity, but I think it would be a great thing.”
Trump is of course exploiting tensions in Los Angeles, too. It’s surprising to no one that Trump would throw gasoline on an ember if it meant more red meat for the base. He loves the protests and all that come with them — the optics for him are priceless.
And Newsom isn’t wrong to oppose Trump’s obvious overreach in California. Sending in the literal Marines is a gross abuse of power and a wholly unnecessary escalation in response.
But don’t be fooled — Newsom is very much in on the bit, even going so far as to taunt Homan to go ahead and arrest him. He knows that by drawing Trump in as a foil, he only elevates himself.
See, Newsom badly needs Trump and he needs this moment. After a disastrous effort to rebrand as a centrist, during which he welcomed far-right creepers like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon onto his podcast and attempted to scold his own party for going too far on social issues (that he also supported), Gavin needs to remind his base that he’s still a good Democrat.
Being a vocal Trump opponent is an easy win, but that no longer has the cachet it once does. In 2024, voters got wise to the cheap calorie thrills of watching their Democratic leaders bluster about Trump’s awfulness while they simultaneously dismissed the impacts of a cratering economy, an exploding migrant crisis on the border, and unchecked crime.
Newsom’s California is an unmitigated mess, and to many voters the state — like him — has become the poster child for everything that’s failing in America.
Including among Californians themselves.
A recent L.A. Times/UC Berkeley poll found that California registered voters believe by more than 2 to 1 that Newsom is more focused on boosting his presidential chances than fixing the state’s problems.
Only 46% approve of his performance in his final term, and a majority think things are generally going in the wrong direction.
Maybe that’s because the state has the highest cost of living in the country. While Newsom closed prisons and passed soft-on-crime laws, the crime rate went up. California has America’s most homelessness, highest health care costs, worst pollution and highest taxes.
Last year, ConsumerAffairs ranked California the worst state to move to, due to low scores in education, health, quality of life and safety.
Meanwhile, Newsom has exploded the size of California’s government, with the number of government employees reaching its highest level in more than five decades. Per CalMatters, Newsom even doubled the size of his own office, going from 150 employees in 2018 before he became governor to 381 people in 2024.
Perhaps Newsom’s hoping that this new fight with Trump over immigration will make voters turn a blind eye to his demonstrable failures as an executive, and just in time for 2028.
But after the reckoning Dems faced in 2024, with Trump winning all seven swing states and all kinds of voters Dems used to claim, no one should believe a far-left, big-government, self-promoting California pol like Newsom is their best shot at beating Republicans.
And no one should believe he’s not laser-focused on becoming just that either.
As L.A. Times columnist Mark Z. Barabak put it, Newsom’s denials of his presidential ambition, “all the while very purposefully thrusting himself into the conversation” is “sort of like someone stripping naked, standing in a department store window, then asking why everyone is staring.” No one’s buying it.
S.E. Cupp: Democrats, Gavin Newsom Is Not Your Blueprint was originally published by the Tribune Content Agency. S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.