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.
“The process itself—it allowed me to shed a lot of that layer,” he notes. “And let some things go. Like, when my mother told me, it’s okay to be average—I had so much resentment, so much hatred, and, frankly, I was feeling that even during the writing. And then I began to understand: She was trying to let me know, Gavin, it’s okay to be you.”
That conversation, our second, was over Zoom—the way I’m used to seeing Newsom. On-screen. The first time we met, we were in his office in Sacramento, and I was asking for the why driving his political ambitions. “The Democrats look out for the little guy, for the folks that are just trying to make ends meet—not the elite, the well-heeled, the well-connected,” he said. “Obviously, those politics have changed over the years. But that’s my origin story.” He gestured to a photograph of Bobby Kennedy with his father, a family keepsake. “So much of my early consciousness is shaped by that photo. What politics means and how it matters. Solving for ignorance, poverty, and disease.” As he spoke, late-summer sun slanted in through the windows, bathing Newsom in an oh so California magic-hour glow. I’d prepared for this sit-down by consuming the spectacle of Gavin Newsom—tweets, TV hits, interviews, umpteen episodes of his podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom—and was having a hard time taking in the man. His actual molecular reality. Immaculate. Fantastic at gab, like a windup doll: “We, California, had a $177.7 billion operating surplus, with the largest tax rebate in US history. That did not go to the one percent, that went to others. And with that surplus, we were able to make historic and unprecedented investments—pre-K for all, did $1.9 million in college savings accounts, invested in our institutions of learning. I believe in progressive tax policy. We’re the most progressive state in the country. Contrast that with Florida, the most regressive state…. Florida is the ‘high tax state,’ we’re not. So this whole nomenclature is BS, right? It’s fictitious. And through that progressive tax policy, we lost taxpayers. Elon Musk, after all the wealth he was able to amass in our state, he wanted to take his capital gains to Texas.” Oh, the disdain on Newsom’s face.
Newsom’s lanky frame was folded onto a sofa a bit too low-slung for him. This made him lean back—away from me. Or it could be that his body language had nothing to do with ergonomics and is a function of Newsom’s quality of being at once gregarious and aloof. “Easy to get along with, hard to know,” is how former San Francisco Chronicle columnist and KCBS radio analyst Phil Matier puts it. “Does he bare his soul? Not easily,” says Stanlee Gatti, one of Newsom’s dearest friends. Gatti met Newsom well before he stumbled into a career in politics, back when Newsom was just a hustling San Francisco restaurateur and wine merchant, honorary member of the wealthy Getty clan, and in-demand bachelor-about-town. At the time, Gatti did not see a mayoralty, governorship, or a presidency on the horizon. “Gavin’s too much of an artist,” he explains. “He’s a sensitive soul.”
This was not the first time I’d heard about Newsom’s artistic temperament. One of his staffers mentioned it to me in the context of getting onto his schedule, a maddening process, describing the governor’s approach to his agenda as “jazzy.” Apparently, to the extent possible, Newsom likes to be spontaneous. Which is curious in a politician—especially one so fastidious in other respects. All his bold plans are tracked in an “accountability matrix” binder he keeps at hand. Every day starts with lemon water, and he consumes nothing but fruit until noon. If Newsom has been spotted disheveled in public, show me the proof. And yet: “The frescoes of Giotto from the dawn of the Renaissance, the intense dark and light from the angry hand of Caravaggio…. I had never derived such contentment from a book,” Newsom writes in Young Man in a Hurry, recalling a semester abroad studying art history in Rome. Then, at university, he studied political science.
“I’m a stuff-everywhere person; he has defined piles,” says first partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom. “When he cooks, he cleans as he cooks. Dishes in the dishwasher—though I don’t always agree with how he puts them in,” she adds, echoing a lament of many partners across this great land. (Maybe he’s loading them artistically.) “He’s not a robot. But, basically, he’s at it two hours before the rest of us. Mr. Fix-It. When you’re married to that, it can get exhausting. I work hard, but sometimes I’m like, Okay, I’m going for a hike with my girlfriends. He’ll just keep going.”
“It’s a need to take care of people,” Siebel Newsom goes on. “He was raised by a single mom who’d hold down two or three jobs and he had to be the man of the house, in a way. And his environmental activist judge father—he indoctrinated Gavin with a sense of justice and fairness. And so he’ll take everything on. I remind him, You don’t always have to be the savior.”
Newsom’s yin-yang personality carries on a legacy. On his mother’s side, a line of troubled souls and eccentrics. I’d read a whole book about his socialist avant-garde actress grandmother, stage name Trigger Addis. On his father’s side, the Newsoms go back a ways in California politics. Newsom’s grandfather, William A. Newsom II, helped launch future governor Pat Brown’s political career. When Pat Brown’s son, Jerry, became governor, he appointed William A. Newsom III, Gavin’s father, to the bench. His dad’s other pals included heavyweights such as John Burton, former chair of the California Democratic Party, and Nancy Pelosi, whose brother-in-law was, until 1977, married to Gavin Newsom’s aunt. (Barbara Newsom went on to become President Carter’s representative to the United Nations.) Former speaker Pelosi has known the governor, in her own words, “his whole life.” So my saying he “stumbled into a career in politics” isn’t quite right. Stumbled, maybe. But in the right direction, because he’d been steered. “His father was grooming him for big things, even as a kid,” Matier explains.
People assume Newsom comes from money. He doesn’t. Access, yes. Privilege, yes. Money, no. The most compelling aspect of Newsom’s biography is his schizophrenic upbringing, vis-à-vis wealth. After his parents’ divorce, his father seems not to have provided much financial support. Tessa Newsom, née Menzies, scrambled to keep the family afloat. Young Gavin chipped in, picking up a newspaper route and a job as a busboy. They took in foster kids because the government stipend helped pay the rent. Meanwhile, there were the Gettys.
At the time Gavin Newsom was born, J. Paul Getty was, by some estimates, the richest man in the world. The best friend to his son Gordon Getty—like a brother, really—was Bill Newsom, Gavin’s dad. Newsom Sr. managed the Getty trust. When Gordon’s nephew, John Paul Getty III, was kidnapped in Italy in 1973, Bill was dispatched with the ransom (a story dramatized in the FX series Trust, with Harris Dickinson as John Paul Getty III). Bill saw his services as consigliere paid back in kind as Gordon Getty and his wife, Ann, took care of Gavin—in many ways, over many years. Gavin and his sister, Hilary, were treated as family. Whipsawing between living paycheck-to-paycheck and, say, hopping a private jet to attend the coming-out party of a Spanish princess “was the split personality of my life,” Newsom writes in Young Man, his tone blithe. Elsewhere, there are cracks. “I was always aware of the line that separated us from the Gettys. Not because they went out of their way to make us aware of it but because we, as good Newsoms”—good courtiers—“paid constant mind to the distinction.” He writes:
Our mother didn’t know what to do with the memories we carted home from our Getty trips…. It was almost as if we were strangers to her. ‘So, another grand excursion has come to an end,’ she’d greet us at the front door…. For a day or two, she’d give us the silent treatment, and then we’d all fall back into the form of a life of trying to make ends meet.
You could argue that Newsom was tailor-made for this moment: He’s lived precarity and borne witness to extreme inequality. And it’s true, unlike many technocratic Dems of his ilk, Newsom didn’t start repeating “affordability” ad nauseam only after learning how to pronounce zoh-ran mam-dah-nee. As San Francisco mayor, he was an affordable housing YIMBY before it was trendy. Running for governor in 2018, the word was on the tip of his tongue, as when he told Tad Friend of The New Yorker, “Affordability…it’s the issue.” Earlier this year, delivering his State of the State: “Affordability—that’s not a word we just discovered, and it’s certainly not a hoax.”
“A little shot against Trump,” Newsom tells me with a smirk. “Not a hoax. And not one issue. A stack of issues.” He charges on: facts about rental protections, facts about mortgages. “Then we started to look at that stack in relationship to ‘the new cost of eggs,’ your utility bills”—I stop him here. Isn’t this the Democrats’ problem again and again and again, which is that they make everything sound dizzyingly complicated, and thus voters get the impression that any given problem in America is a million-piece jigsaw puzzle they find impossible to solve? Surely he, media-savvy Gavin Newsom, is capable of better messaging. What’s the Democratic equivalent of Make America Great Again? Where’s its answer to Build the Wall?
Silence. Newsom is choosing his words…and I’ll fill in the pause with some additional background. “I first ran across him at Balboa Cafe,” recalls ex-Chronicle columnist Matier, referring to the iconic Fillmore Street canteen that Newsom and his PlumpJack Group partner Billy Getty took over in 1995. “He’s always been a sort of princeling type of person,” a favorite of the wealthy Pacific Heights Democratic Party establishment, Matier explains. “That’s your Pelosis, your Dianne Feinstein. Which is how he got picked up by Mayor Willie Brown and appointed to the Board of Supervisors.” That was in 1997. Newsom was 29. Many Balboa Cafe habitués were, as a 1998 New York Times Style section story put it, “offspring of the city’s old and moneyed families”—Trainas, Guggenheims, Fishers, Pritzkers. Later, as mayor, and as California’s lieutenant governor and then governor, he would develop close ties with the Bay Area’s emerging aristocracy, its cadre of tech founders. These were working relationships, but sometimes friendships as well. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is godfather to Newsom’s eldest daughter. Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page attended his wedding to Siebel Newsom in 2008. Now Brin and Page are cutting ties with California, getting ahead of a measure that may land on the November ballot that would allow voters in the state to impose a one-time 5 percent “wealth tax” on residents with a net worth over $1 billion. I assume that, as with Elon Musk decamping to Texas, this causes Newsom chagrin. But in this instance, it’s the tax in his crosshairs: He’s opposed. I bring all this up to point out that, for Newsom, “the rich” are not abstract, they are not a monolith, they are the people he’s around, mostly, aside from his family and staff.
“Here’s where I find myself struggling,” he says. “I just—I don’t begrudge others their success. Other good people do. And I feel like my party is not as pro-aspirational as it once was.” He accepts the premise, he says, that inequality and affordability and precarity must be addressed. He demonstrates this via policy, e.g., establishing prescription assistance program CalRx and, as of this January, selling state-branded insulin for $11 a pen. He grasps that part of Trump’s appeal is that he harvests the resentments that have ripened as the gap between rich and poor has stretched—and he grasps the dangers of this: As he said in his State of the State address, quoting Plutarch, “this imbalance of the rich and the poor ‘is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.’ ”
“But where my politics are different—I don’t like to scapegoat,” he says. “The system, to me, is the issue. It may be my political undoing but it’s inauthentic to me to attack someone who’s very wealthy and successfully played by all the rules.”
What is the Democratic Party today? What does it do? Who does it stand for? How big is its tent—and should it be bigger, or smaller, or some convoluted new fractal shape? I don’t have the answer to these questions. Nor does Nancy Pelosi: “The American people will make their decision about the direction we go in,” she tells me, before cutting short our call to dash back to the House floor, muttering, “Ugh—disaster.”
Every day augurs some new threat—to democracy, to decency. The August day of the kickoff Prop 50 campaign rally in Los Angeles coincided with the first day of school; en route, I passed an elementary school where staff were blockading the doors against ICE. “They’ve been in the neighborhood all summer,” a teacher told me, as a colleague ushered students in one at a time. “We’re worried about kids actually showing up,” said Assemblyman Isaac Bryan, who represents California’s 55th District, which includes large parts of South Los Angeles. “People are afraid to go to school. Afraid to go to work. Afraid to get care: At the community clinics, a 30 percent decline in the number of patients. The economic impact—I don’t even know how you’d quantify.” Later, I spotted Border Patrol agents hovering at the edge of the rally grounds. It wasn’t hard. They were making themselves conspicuous.
“Donald Trump loves a spectacle,” noted California senator Alex Padilla, of the agents, with a sigh. He, like his longtime ally Newsom, who appointed him to his seat, had had it. The time had come, he agreed, to fight back against “this Trump-MAGA effort to define who’s American and who’s not.” Padilla was among the pols joining Newsom to rally support for Prop 50. Two months earlier, after the springtime escalation of LA ICE raids and consequent rise in protest, and following Trump’s June deployment, over Newsom’s objections, of the National Guard to Los Angeles, Padilla had been forcibly removed by federal agents from a press conference led by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. I happened to be in Paris as all this was playing out, and watching these events unfold on France 24 felt uncomfortably like observing the travails of foreign nations under the thumb of semi-benign dictators, when now and then the population gets restive and needs to be reminded who’s boss. Newsom took to the airwaves: “Democracy is under assault right before our eyes. The moment we’ve feared has arrived.” The January crisis in Minneapolis, which was unfolding as this story went to print, made what happened in LA seem almost quaint.
“Ever since Trump famously came down the golden escalator, there’s been this debate about, is American fascism on the horizon, or what would that even mean, to worry about an American form of authoritarianism?” says the journalist Andrew Marantz. A staff writer at The New Yorker, Marantz has also been cohosting an occasional podcast series for the magazine, How Bad Is It?, which takes the vitals of American democracy. “There’s not one moment and democracy is gone,” he says; the examples are countries like Turkey or Hungary that backslid into what’s known as “competitive authoritarianism.” The optics of democracy remain, like voting. “And it doesn’t mean it’s permanent or that we can’t come back,” Marantz adds. “But it does mean that if you’re the opposition party in an era of creeping authoritarianism, you have a very pronounced responsibility to stop the creep.”
This Is Gavin Newsom launched a year ago, debuting with a cordial conversation with Charlie Kirk. That was soon followed by chats with Steve Bannon, Michael Savage, Dr. Phil. Most pundits interpreted this guest list as triangulation: MAGA was ascendant, and Newsom, that slick operator, wanted to shed his image as a “woke” California progressive as he looked ahead to 2028. That is almost certainly true, and at the same time not the whole story.
To be clear, the majority of This Is Gavin Newsom guests have not been MAGA-aligned or even right-wing. And the show has drifted leftward since Newsom entered his Leader of the Opposition era last June, with his speech decrying Trump’s Guard deployment. But he stands by his choice to launch the show talking to people with whom he vehemently disagrees. “My purpose in having Charlie on wasn’t to discuss his politics,” says Newsom. “I don’t share his politics. I don’t like the way he talked down to people. I don’t like what he said about the gay community and minorities. The purpose was to discuss why the hell does he have so much influence? Wake up. There’s 40 percent or whatever it is in this country that feels deeply differently than we do, and we need to understand this movement and not be so quick to dismiss it. Divorce is not an option. So what are we going to do about this?” he continues. “We’ve got a lot of work to do—rebranding, rebuilding, a lot of work as a party. Wake the hell up.”
Newsom points out one other thing too. “I didn’t platform Charlie—he platformed me. I didn’t have one follower. He had millions.”
Charlie Kirk was a pro at The Politics Show, a superstar. And he was an incredibly effective organizer—especially of young people, especially of young men. “Young men” may be the topic most addressed on This Is Gavin Newsom. He is desperate to reach them. And, broad strokes, he looks around, at the might of the right-wing media sphere, and he sees lessons in its success.
“They’re still doing $500,000 TV shoots. For who?” asks Charlie Goldensohn, a.k.a. @chezchuck on TikTok, with disgust. Once an aide to former first lady Dr. Jill Biden, and later a senior adviser to the Kamala Harris campaign, Goldensohn, 32, took to social media in part because he was fed up with the Democratic Party’s archaic approach to campaigning. Money going to TV ads, he says, is better invested in developing a digital media infrastructure to rival that of conservatives. Goldensohn admires the “always-on media strategy” of the right, which Newsom is now mimicking. “A good thing about Gavin and his team, the day after Kamala lost, they were like, We’re not going to stop campaigning, we’re going to keep people talking, we’re going to be everywhere,” Goldensohn says. “And I think they’ve acknowledged, this isn’t an even playing field. Charlie Kirk, the Daily Caller—is it the morally right thing to engage? Maybe not one hundred percent, but what else can we do? We need to take advantage of the opportunities we have in their spaces, because their spaces dominate.”
Betrayal might be too mild a word for the emotion felt by members of the LGBTQ+ community apropos Kirk’s appearance on This Is Gavin Newsom. Newsom was their champion, the guy who, as freshly minted mayor, had in 2004 sparked San Francisco’s “Winter of Love” when he ordered the issuance of same-sex marriage licenses. Now he was seeking common ground with Kirk on the issue of trans athletes in women’s sports. “How can we address this issue with the kind of decency that I think is inherent in you but not always expressed on the issue,” he said to Kirk, “but at the same time deal with the unfairness?”
The title Young Man in a Hurry is taken from an article about Newsom in The Economist published during his second mayoral term, which notes that his nervy stance on gay marriage vaulted him to political stardom. The history is telling. Most obviously in showing that he’ll pick a big, messy fight for a cause he believes in. You see him repeat this with Prop 50, operating at political hyperspeed: introducing the measure, getting it on the November ballot, getting it passed. Another aspect of Newsom’s character is his unabashed readiness, when it suits him, to piss off his friends. “Too much, too fast, too soon,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein of Mayor Newsom’s gay marriage effort in 2004, speaking for many Democrats in Washington who favored an incremental approach to an issue Newsom saw as one of human rights.
Newsom has been vindicated by history. “He believes he’s coming from the right place, and he believes in his ability to get things done, so if he puts himself out there, it’s for the greater good,” says Gatti, thinking through his old friend’s way of choosing his battles. A rather intuitive, unpredictable mode of politics, this, for a man who carries an accountability-matrix binder around. Extemporaneous. Jazzy.
The thing is, jazzy politics are hard to define. “Half the puzzle is reaching those people, being able to hang in those spaces,” notes Goldensohn. “The other half is, what do you have to say? I worked on the Kamala campaign and I don’t remember her policy positions. The brilliance of ‘Build the Wall’ is that you know exactly what it means, literally and on a metaphorical, ideological level. And Gavin, if someone listens to him for two hours and they’re like, ‘Okay, good vibes, but I still don’t know what this guy’s about,’ how much has he gained?”
“If there are free elections in a couple years, I’ll be surprised if he’s not the nominee,” says filmmaker Adam McKay (The Big Short, Vice, Don’t Look Up). He’s not enthused. McKay is a man of the left. Any candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination will have to convince some portion of this cohort—many of them Gen Z—that he or she is prepared to go toe-to-toe with Big Tech, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Wall Street. Big Money, in brief. “Hollywood is collapsing. My sister works in public schools—that’s collapsing. I have a friend who trained to become a pharmacist—that’s hard, you know? He quit and works construction. It used to be, the coolest job in the world was airline pilot, now five pilots share a hotel room.” McKay, a Californian, sees Newsom as a creature of the capitalist elite; this is the constituency, he assumes, that will bankroll Newsom’s presidential candidacy. “Either they prop him up and he loses, or he wins and does nothing and fascism comes back bigger and louder.” Think Nick Fuentes 2032.
There’s a story missing from Young Man in a Hurry. “Why the hell is that not in the book?!?” Newsom splutters, aghast at himself, when I bring up the battle royale between Unite Here Local 2 and 14 San Francisco hotels. In the first year of Newsom’s mayoralty, the hotel workers went on strike. For reasons that don’t bear going into here, this turned into a bigger fight than anyone anticipated. The union had bitterly opposed Newsom in his race. He was the “money” candidate. Moreover, as the founder of a small but growing hospitality empire, his sympathies were sure to align with the hoteliers. Nope. “Just because you write me checks,” he told a reporter, “doesn’t mean you should predict my stances.” Union leaders and hotel honchos were astonished to find Mayor Newsom out on the picket line, calling out the capitalists. “You went after 4,000 people who are struggling to make ends meet, forced out into the rain during the holidays,” he said. “We won’t put up with it. Not in our town.”
“We’re at the St. Francis hotel—I’m meeting all the hotel owners, I thought, Okay, there’ll be about 10, we’re talking about a few hotels. But it was like, 120 people,” Newsom recalls. He’s relishing the anecdote. “It hadn’t occurred to me that the owners were no longer local owners. These were all representatives from hedge funds and, you know, international this, that, and the other. And this one guy reflected on how the St. Francis was part of his P&L. And I’m like, We’re talking about the St. Francis here. These are our memories. And he looks at me and basically says, Well, we can afford to lose money on the strike.” Newsom shakes his head. He’s got that look of poisonous disdain back on his face. “And I’m like, Well, we can’t. And this is our city.”
Gavin Newsom does have the capacity to surprise. You can’t say that about many politicians of his stature—or that their minds are still pliable. There were topics I didn’t get to discuss with him—the LA wildfires, contraction and corporate consolidation in Hollywood, homelessness, the coming AI apocalypse, to name a few—but where we did range, I saw a man who likes spitballing, trying ideas on for size. “I never thought of it that way” is something he often says. Newsom sees himself as continuously “iterating,” a favorite word. He can also be blustery and defensive, and there were a few times I felt chided for my naivete, but for the most part he engages in free-form, good faith conversation. He believes in it, in an unfashionable, West Wing–y way, as he also believes, rather unfashionably, in bipartisanship. “The CHIPS and Science Act, infrastructure; so many of the most significant achievements of the Biden administration were bipartisan,” he points out. “He got it done. How? He pursued common ground with an open hand, not a closed fist. That’s what you do in a system where we have presidents, not kings.”
It is no longer possible to avoid The Politics Show. Joe Biden tried. I kept asking Newsom, How do we improve politics, at the level of policy? He kept answering, Yes, yes, policy, but you’ve also got to sort things out at the level of show. I see This Is Gavin Newsom as an expression of its host’s earnest longing for a place within the spectacle where Americans can talk to one another, across the red/blue divide. He also kept saying “divorce is not an option.” It reminded me that Gavin Newsom has married twice.
If you are hunting through Young Man in a Hurry for spicy tea on Newsom’s first, confounding marriage to Kimberly Guilfoyle, no dice. I mention Guilfoyle here for the sake of analogy. Do we, as Americans, want to wind up like Gavin Newsom and Kimberly Guilfoyle, as we know them of late on TV? Two larger-than-life personalities who have spiraled off in such different directions—he becoming the #resistance hero, she a MAGA warrior-princess, and, for a time, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée—it’s impossible to imagine them in the same room. Or do we approach our country the way Newsom approached his current wife, when they met on an epic blind date that found them conversing through the night? I’m a registered Republican, she told him, hours in. He took a deep breath. They kept talking. They figured it out.
“I’ve seen him grow politically, I’ve also seen him have this beautiful family, and for all of us who love him, seeing him evolve has been wonderful to behold,” says Pelosi. She’s not making any endorsements, but she compliments Newsom’s mix of “idealism and pragmatism.” “You have to have a way of getting it done,” she notes.
In Young Man in a Hurry, Newsom recalls a teenage obsession with the TV series Remington Steele. Starring Pierce Brosnan and Stephanie Zimbalist, the show was about a female detective who, struggling to be taken seriously, hires a suave con man as her front. Brosnan, as Steele, was always impeccably turned out; Newsom began emulating him, coiffing his hair, wearing a suit to school. “Some of my schoolmates started calling me El Presidente,” he writes. The account is funny. It also struck me, reading—Gavin Newsom is still that guy. But he’s the Zimbalist character too: the one who dreamed up the showman in the first place, the one who’s doing the work.
In this story: grooming, Emily Sims.
Produced by AL Studio. Set Design: Mary Howard. Location: The Peace Barn.
