Everyone, including me, has a podcast now—so it’s hard to begrudge Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, for indulging his God-given right to produce audio content. “This Is Gavin Newsom” is five episodes into its run and, outside of a four-minute emergency update on the Menendez brothers’ trial and a lengthy conversation with Governor Tim Walz, each episode has featured Newsom interviewing right-wing figures, namely Charlie Kirk, Michael Savage, and Steve Bannon. The point of all this, Newsom explains in an introductory segment, is “tackling tough questions, engaging with people who don’t always agree with me, debating without demeaning.” Newsom seems to believe that regular Americans have grown tired of polarization and want to see ideological enemies find common ground.
I’ll be blunt: Up until the Walz episode (more about that in a moment), “This Is Gavin Newsom” was the strangest political podcast I had ever heard. And not in a good way. In the first four episodes, Newsom seems incapable of interrogating any right-wing position—whether on tariffs, book bans, trans women in sports, wokeness, or the mess at the border. It feels like a stretch to even describe these episodes as interviews, because Newsom sounds fairly uninterested in what his guests are saying. Bannon, for example, says more than once to Newsom that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. And, though Bannon acknowledges in passing that Newsom disagrees with him about the election-fraud claim, Newsom offers zero pushback to the idea and acts almost as if he didn’t hear it.
What the episodes really offer is an opportunity for Newsom to say that he agrees with various conservative talking points, including the unfairness of trans women competing in sports, and the weakness of Kamala Harris’s campaign, and the unnecessary vilification of the white male. These may be electoral soft spots for liberals, and might warrant some debate or even a shift in messaging. But Newsom doesn’t offer his own thoughts on these topics so much as nod along with his guests. He makes a few meek objections about marriage equality and tax policy, and says something brief about having compassion for the trans athletes whom he believes should not be allowed to compete. But the impression that the podcast has left so far is that the Democratic governor of a deep-blue state mostly agrees with everything Kirk and Bannon think about this country. Throughout the episodes, he claims to “appreciate” this or that point his guests are making—so much so that Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, later said, on his own podcast, that he thought Newsom had been “overly effusive.” When Newsom offered the occasional rebuttal, he kept saying that he wanted to “stress-test” a claim that Kirk had made, as if Newsom, the fifty-seven-year-old governor of the most populous state in the country, were a McKinsey consultant giving cautious advice to a powerful client who didn’t want to hear any real criticism.
It would have been more interesting to hear your standard-issue Fox News host interview Kirk, Savage, and Bannon, because at least that host might have spots of internal disagreement within the right and might have pushed back from time to time. In tennis terms, what “This Is Gavin Newsom” has mostly provided is not spirited, five-set matches, but the spectacle of one player jogging behind every ball, serving underhand, and calling his own shots out, even the ones that are three feet in.
In his defense, I imagine Newsom didn’t start a podcast in the hope that it would be good. Rather, this is a soft launch for a Presidential run in 2028, like the mostly tepid memoirs published by myriad candidates in the past. With his eyes presumably on that prize, Newsom is distancing himself as much as possible from the progressive wing of his party, and from any unpopular positions that his political allies might have adopted in the past decade. This attempt at reinvention has, so far, failed: the show has been panned by local and national media; Capitol Weekly, a news outlet that mostly covers Sacramento, conducted a poll showing a ten-point negative swing in opinions of Newsom among voters who listened to the podcast. Republicans said he was “pandering,” while many liberals were disgusted that Newsom would bend the knee to someone such as Kirk, particularly with such shameless enthusiasm.
A single opinion survey should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt; it’s at least theoretically possible that swing voters will like Newsom’s pandering, or that Democrats will abandon their beliefs and vote for a Republican apologist in the primary. But it’s unlikely. And it may even reinforce what I believe is still Newsom’s most glaring weakness: not liberalism but the perception that he is slick and hypocritical, an image that was famously solidified when Newsom attended a fancy dinner party at the French Laundry during the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Newsom, in his conversation with Kirk, said that dinner was the “dumbest bonehead move of my life,” which may be true. (It helped to fuel a recall election, which he managed to weather.) But I do not think there is any way for him to live that down. People know who Gavin Newsom is: a San Francisco liberal who went to a lobbyist’s birthday party while most of his constituents stayed inside, ordered food delivered by essential workers, feared their neighbors, got sick, and died.
Newsom’s gambit, though ill-fated and embarrassing in practice, does come out of a coherent school of liberal thought, one that I find much more interesting than his Presidential chances. This school of thought seems to take it as a given that Democrats need to actively distance themselves from a whole host of positions that are now associated with the Party. Where does a politics of pure disavowal lead? In a few years’ time, will Newsom get up on a stage in Iowa and offer up a mantra of land-acknowledgment-like apologies? I can picture it: “I, Gavin Newsom, acknowledge and apologize for my party’s past support for trans athletes, open borders, defunding the police, school closures during a pandemic, the word ‘Latinx,’ and the Presidential campaign of Kamala Harris.” Would anyone like that?
Newsom’s governor-to-governor chat with Walz provides a little more insight into why Newsom wants to be a Democrat at all—even if, as with the previous four agreement-fests, he mostly just concurs with what his guest is saying (in this case, about the need for better governance and helping working people). What Newsom offers to Walz is the suggestion that Democrats need to go on the “offensive,” to fight back against right-wing demonization of women, minorities, and L.G.B.T.Q. people. Still, he fails to explain what that offense would look like, and he quickly moves on to more chitchat about reaching across the aisle. The takeaway from the conversation is that Walz—who talks frankly about the Party’s problems in attracting young men, the ways in which it has failed in governance, and its inability to take credit for the things its members do well—should probably be the one who runs for President. Walz notes that the Democratic Party is “unified in being pissed off at the Democratic Party.” The person who can harness that anger is not someone who kowtows to Kirk and Bannon.
What Newsom and the disavowers out there should remember is that there are still a lot of liberals in America, and that pandering to an aggrieved, mostly imagined group of voters—the sort of people who would supposedly want to vote for a liberal Steve Bannon in linen pants—is not only silly from an electoral standpoint but humiliating on a personal level. A CNN poll published last weekend found that the majority of Democrats and Democrat-aligned independents want their elected officials to “stop the Republican agenda” and to stop working with the G.O.P. That same poll—which was conducted before Senate Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer, decided to pass the G.O.P. budget, to a howl of dissent from their colleagues in the House—found a record-low favorability rating of twenty-nine per cent for the Democratic Party. The G.O.P. whips everyone into line and enforces ideological uniformity with insults like “RINO.” Democrats in the mold of Newsom, meanwhile, take their base for granted and endlessly triangulate and focus-group their positions until they stand for nothing.
When you’re so concerned with trying to convey that you’re not like the other liberals, you won’t really have the time—even in an hour-long podcast—to explain what you believe in. Listening to Newsom get steamrolled by his right-wing guests for three hours, I wondered where his pride had gone. Why couldn’t he tell Bannon that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election? Why couldn’t he say to Kirk that the Republicans’ effort to turn trans athletes into a national wedge issue was, in fact, an opportunistic attack on an entire group of people? Does he believe in the principles of his party? Could he even name them? Any Democratic politician who’s considering a strategy like Newsom’s might ask themselves these same questions. Because the public is not stupid. Even those who might want “moderation” don’t want it in the form of endless capitulation and cowardice. ♦
