The Talented Mr. Newsom

Gavin Newsom could be our next president. But does anyone - including him - know what he stands for? A detailed look at his life suggests the answer might be no.

California has every natural and economic advantage: a long, beautiful coast, great weather, a generations-long stranglehold on cultural production in Los Angeles and advanced technology in Silicon Valley.

Yet years of Democratic misrule have made the state so unlivable its taxpaying residents are fleeing en masse. Building houses, or high-speed rail, or anything else in California is nearly impossible. Meanwhile, the state has done all it can to make itself a home for unemployable illegal migrants, including offering them free medical care.

One might think this record would make Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, an unattractive presidential candidate.

One would be wrong.

The 2028 election is still almost three years out, but prediction markets have Newsom as the leading candidate to become the Democratic nominee in 2028 and trailing only JD Vance to take the White House in 2029.

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(News about California and everywhere else… for pennies a day.)

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Now Newsom, like many a would-be President before, is promoting a new autobiography, Young Man in a Hurry.

His book tour hit an air pocket over the weekend, when he made news for telling an audience in Atlanta about his barely mediocre SAT score — 960 — in a way that made him seem stupid, inauthentic, and possibly racist.

The incident got me thinking about Governor White Teeth, as I called Newsom during Covid. Like other big blue-state governors, Newsom loved lockdowns. He and California clung to them longer than almost anywhere else. Beyond that, though, I didn’t know much about him, aside from the fact he had once been married to Kimberly Guilfoyle.

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Which is why I was so happy to have the chance to read this biography of Newsom from Brad Pearce, an independent journalist in Washington state who writes the Wayward Rabbler Substack. Pearce alerted me to it on X after I made a snarky joke about a wine store Newsom had once opened in San Francisco, writing:

Gavin Newsom's father was a social climber who lived beyond his means and didn't properly support his mother, so he did kind of grow up simultaneously rich and poor. I wrote a full profile of him 6 months ago. Horrible but fascinating man.

Naturally I clicked through to the profile, titled “Gavin Newsom Doesn’t Need a Narrative.” What I found was more interesting, and frightening, than I’d expected.

Pearce presents Newsom as not so much a chameleon as a man without any shape at all. Like Bill Clinton, his most obvious comparator as a modern politician, Newsom grew up without a strong father and used his charm and looks to get ahead — with women and politically.

But Newsom and Clinton differ in crucial ways.

Clinton is far smarter than Newsom. But Newsom grew up in an social and class environment more complex than the one Clinton faced. Newsom was close to the scions of San Francisco’s Nob Hill gentry, a group whose wealth long predates Silicon Valley and is possibly the snobbiest local elite anywhere outside Boston. Yet he didn’t actually have their money, giving him acute status anxiety.

At the same time, Pearce makes a persuasive case that Newsom’s learning disability and lack of genuine intelligence mean that he cannot understand the nuances of difficult policy choices — much less figure out which might be best substantively. He navigates on instinct and his desire for personal approval. Even more than most politicians, Newsom wants to be loved at any cost.

Yet Pearce warns against underestimating Newsom, or his ability to win the Democratic nomination or the Presidency. Newsom is a tall, handsome white man who is the governor of the nation’s largest state, and those facts all by themselves make him a serious candidate. And Newsom’s bullet points style of argument may make him the man for an increasingly post-literate age.

Horrible but fascinating indeed.

The piece is too interesting not to share, so I asked Pearce if I could excerpt it for Unreported Truths readers. He graciously agreed. It is long by Unreported Truths standards and has a lot of discussion of California’s House redistricting plans.

I have cut the redistricting discussion and the opening section of the piece to focus on Newsom’s history and made other cuts for length but have not otherwise edited it. (If you want to read the entire piece, you can find it here - it is not paywalled.)

Even if you skim it, I hope you’ll get to the end. Pearce’s conclusion may surprise you. Yet it’s hard to disagree with his final paragraph.

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Without further ado, courtesy of Brad Pearce and The Wayward Rabbler, everything you need to know but were afraid to ask about the leading Democratic candidate to be our next president:

The basic facts of Gavin Newsom’s earliest years are that he was born in 1967 to William Newsom, a California Superior Court Judge, and Tessa Newsom [née Menzies.] A sixth generation Californian of Irish descent on his father’s side, his father had risen to prominence befriending Gordon Getty of the Getty oil family [also of Getty Images] and later managing his father’s estate.

Newsom’s parents divorced when he was very young and he lived in a small apartment with a struggling single mother. According to an extensive New Yorker profile from 2018, his father was something of a “Disneyland Dad,”

“Bill Newsom…occasionally swooped in to take Gavin on vacation with the Getty family: polar-bear watching in Hudson Bay, safaris in Africa. When he returned from these jaunts, his mother would say, “Hope you had fun! ” and storm off to bed. “The guilt,” he told me. “She made me feel horrible.”

One night, Newsom recalled hearing “my mother yelling and screaming at my dad because he wasn’t able to help us financially, because he was very close to bankruptcy.”

…[Newsom] has relied on his friendship with the Gettys his entire career while running away from the claim that he is privileged. But it seems to be the case that his father got used to a certain lifestyle while privately managing the Getty trust and then he couldn’t maintain it when he got the prestige of the Superior Court position, and helping his ex-wife support the children was never a priority.

Regardless, we’re told that Newsom is simultaneously like an extra son to the heir to one of the wealthiest old money families in California while also the product of an impoverished single mother and this seems to be broadly true.

Perhaps, though, the LA Times gives us the clearest picture of the man with this incredible quote from a 2021 profile, “California’s most powerful politician often begins his day around 6 a.m. alone in his office, struggling to read.”

Yes, Gavin Newsom is dyslexic.

I’m going to allow myself a digression here because, though it is hard to know to what extent this is a narrative his aides came up with so that the slicked back wonderboy with rich friends can claim to be disadvantaged, it seems as if, perhaps more than anything, not being able to read or understand long-form prose is what made Gavin Newsom who he is today.

It’s also notable he has been so willing to talk about this, when an unusually high amount of the articles I read for this piece, even from major papers such as LA Times or Business Insider, could not get a response for their stories, making it evident that this is a political machine comfortable ignoring the media but which wants to talk about dyslexia.

Newsom says, “I can read two chapters and literally be daydreaming, and I’ll have read every word and not remember one damn thing unless I’m underlining it.” What this means is that, with difficulty, he can gather what he needs to pass a test, but can’t actually understand written stories in the normal sense.

Instead of reading as you or I might, Newsom undergoes an intensive process of distilling information down to a few bullet points which don’t require a central narrative,

“I have files and files,” Newsom said. “Everything is underlined, circled, and I put it on 8-by-10 white papers, and then there’s like thousands of these stacks ... every topic, subject matter. And then I take from that subject matter and break it down to two or three pages, and then I try to eventually get it on these yellow cards.”

This all seems to be key to his success as a politician, both his acceptance of having to work harder than everyone else due to his learning disability as well as his entire political thought process being centered on memorizing bullet points.

I think this helps in his shamelessness because he isn’t necessarily even aware of the narrative a normal person might put together based on the facts he presents, he simply answers objections with other facts he has memorized. Here is just one representative example:

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This is in response to Ron DeSantis pointing out that, among other things, California is #1 in homelessness and poverty. This is somewhat normal politician-speak, but none of his positive things have anything to do with Gavin Newsom and are primarily simply that California has about 1/3rd more population to the next closest state and is also the major gateway to the Pacific.

To Newsom, no narrative continuity is required… the entirety of his political rhetoric is having memorized endless little facts because as per his own description it is impossible for him to memorize or read a prepared speech.

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I don’t mean to downplay the achievement of overcoming his dyslexia, but the point is it is hard to know how to respond to someone incapable of feeling shame or processing narrative in a normal fashion because it is outside of the experience of almost everyone.

Regardless, this dyslexia, according to Newsom, had a serious impact on him, making him initially a shy and often bullied child, which I do believe, if he was unable to read out loud. In middle school, Newsom decided to be the person everyone wanted him to be, apparently successfully.

As per the New Yorker profile,

“In middle school, Newsom, drawing inspiration from “Rocky,” took up boxing and drank raw eggs to toughen himself. Then he began applying hair gel and wearing blazers and business suits, a costume inspired by “Remington Steele,” the TV show that starred Pierce Brosnan as a con man who assumes the identity of a glamorous private detective. “The suit was literally a mask,” he said. “I am still that anxious kid with the bowl-cut hair, the dyslexic kid—the rest is a façade. The only thing that saved me was sports.””

Note that Newsom is comfortable saying he is a fake person based on a TV con artist—he just comes out and tells the public this!

At this same time, he started excelling in baseball and basketball, developing his underdog-becomes-overdog persona and his self-image as the powerful defender of the little guy. In many ways this makes him a perfect leader for the modern Marvel-brained American: he can’t understand complex concepts but instead has based his life off of a series of aesthetics and distilled story-line tropes from popular visual media.

This all worked fabulously. Susie Tompkins Buell, the co-founder of the Espirit and North Face clothing lines, and a Democrat megadonor, said the following of Newsom as a young man in a 2018 LA Times story about his support from San Francisco’s most important moneyed families,

“He was the boy about town. Everybody wanted to date him,” she said, recalling that one of her daughters was in a relationship with Newsom in the 1990s. “He was the smartest, the best-looking. He went through a cocky stage, and then an arrogant stage. Now he’s in a total serving stage. He paid his dues, I’ll tell you.”

That last part is obvious nonsense, but is also crucial to understanding the mindset of his long-time supporters, and I suppose it is easy enough to believe that a 17 year old Newsom was a much more extreme version of what he is now.

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Much has been made of Newsom’s baseball background, and by all accounts he likes the game and was a good player in high school. However, the enormous fabrications about this part of his life seem representative and are worth going into. It has been widely reported across major publications that he played baseball at Santa Clara University and was “recruited” by the Texas Rangers.

A 2024 investigation from CalMatters found that Newsom practiced with the team but never played in a varsity game, and that since he became famous it’s actually been a joke among the teammates of those years that he was on their team. It seems that he was unable to balance college sports with schoolwork, which makes sense for a guy who describes himself as needing to spend “like six hours to give a five- or six-minute presentation…”

…according to the same CalMatters investigation, though there is evidence that Newsom received one $500 scholarship to play on the JV team his first quarter of college, how this came about was that Bill Connoly, a long time San Francisco investment banker, associate of Bill Newsom, and Santa Clara baseball alumni and donor to the program, put the younger Newsom “on their radar.” However, the former assistant coach interviewed says “the baseball program was not a backdoor into the university.”

For that, it seems his family relied on letters of recommendation they solicited from former California Governor Jerry Brown as well as from an attorney named John Mallen who was on the University’s Board of Regents at the time, and who later described Bill Newsom as his “best friend of 75 years” and said this may have been the only such letter he ever wrote in that position, “In fact, I may not have helped anybody else get in…I mean, I’d known him since birth…He was a good athlete. That I remember…I think it was a big help.”

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Newsom at the opening of his PlumpJack wine shop in 1992. Fellas, watch your wives and daughters around this guy.

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…[Newsom] managed to graduate in 1989 with a degree in Political Science, and then went into business, starting the PlumpJack Wine & Spirits shop with the funding of Billy Getty. He then expanded to the Balboa Café, which became the haunt of all the scions of the local oligarchs, who would later be Newsom’s earliest political donors.

Much has been said about Newsom being “bought off” by this group of oligarchs, but it needs to be understood that he doesn’t believe in anything in the first place and is actually part of their social circle, so there is no reason he would want to do anything they don’t want; it is less a matter of being “bought off” and more a matter of them supporting someone who was already on their team.

It also seems to be the case that Newsom kept getting money from the Gettys to expand his businesses because they were successful under his leadership, as opposed to the Gettys just pouring money into some tangential dependent. It is not at all hard to see how this particular guy with his taste for fine living and self-described “facade” based on a con artist played by Pierce Brosnan would be successful in luxury hospitality businesses.

There have been several newspaper investigations into Newsom’s business empire -18 businesses and $1.5 million annual income for Newsom as of 2018- and I don’t find them that interesting, though I am amused and impressed that Newsom and his wife made perhaps around $500,000 per year trading silver bars during his time as Lieutenant Governor [assuming this wasn’t just a scheme to launder bribes, a big assumption, this would be about the most honest way a major politician could make money while in office.]

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As a businessman, Newsom became a big supporter of Willie Brown’s campaign for mayor - this of course being the same Willie Brown currently most nationally famous for having been some sort of lover of Kamala Harris back in the day when she was fairly hot. This got him put on some boring traffic committee which our “Young Man in a Hurry” managed to leverage into getting onto the Board of Supervisors and then into running for, and winning, the mayoralty at age 36, the youngest mayor of San Francisco in a century.

After becoming mayor, Newsom, following such a law passing in Massachusetts, ordered the city to begin marrying gay couples, against both state and federal law. I remember this, and it was years after he became Governor of California that I discovered it was the same person; even as a lib teenager who hated traditional values, at the time I thought he was a maniac for doing this unilaterally.

It is unclear why Newsom took such a step, though I imagine he felt he would get enormous praise from San Franciscans [which he did] and be seen as a bold leader by his party nationally [which he was not.] The party bigwigs were uniformly furious, with Nancy Pelosi saying the issue was “moving too fast,” while Dianne Feinstein blamed him for John Kerry’s 2004 loss after Republicans seized on the issue; it’s said that Kerry still blames him.

After California passed Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage in 2008, Newsom seemed defeated on this issue. But when the Supreme Court overturned Proposition 8 and restored California’s prior short-lived gay marriage law in 2013, finally settling all the lawsuits started after Newsom issued licenses in 2004, it seemed he was a man ahead of his time.

Newsom in 2004 with a lesbian couple he allowed to illegally marry. Dude looks like he has ideas.

This is an enormous political asset for Newsom now, having been ahead of all of the old class of politicians on the defining cultural issue of our era for the Democrats, who instantly adopted gay marriage as a key dogma after the Obergefell regardless of any prior views they held on the matter and demanded everyone else did the same. Newsom told the New Yorker that while he remains proud of the act of civil disobedience,

“So many of my political heroes read me the riot act. And, look, for a lot of years there was a lot of evidence that they were right…I don’t know if I’d have the guts to do it again. Because back then I didn’t know what I didn’t know—I had a beginner’s mind.”

As usual, he gets to be on every side of every issue, having taken the “right” stance at the time, but also saying he thinks he would be more “responsible” now.

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During the time that Newsom was a reviled figure amongst his party as Mayor of San Francisco he went through a wayward period of drinking and slacking off that sounds really fun though speaks poorly of his character. Among other things, in 2005, while going through a divorce, Newsom began sleeping with his appointments chief, Ruby Rippey-Tourk, the wife of his Chief of Staff.

He acknowledged the affair two years later, and said he would seek treatment for alcohol abuse. Rippey-Tourk herself went on sick leave for alcohol abuse and managed to get paid $10,000 by the city, against procedure, under a catastrophic illness program. During this time he also brought a 19-year-old girlfriend to a public event, where she was photographed drinking wine. This quote from the New Yorker is particularly informative,

“But, even as he cast his tribulations as a part of the hero’s arc, he avoided detailing why they had happened. When I pushed, he obscured himself in a cloud of bullet points: “Personal journey, renewal, turning the page.””

Once again, he understands the “bullet point” aspects of narrative but is not capable of explaining them.

Anyway, he went to a counselor for alcohol abuse, providing another incredible passage from the same article:

“The first thing Silbert did was to tell him to stop drinking. (Two years later, having decided he wasn’t an alcoholic, she gave him permission to drink socially.) “I have two speeds, on and off,” Newsom told me he’d explained. “I said to Mimi, ‘When I have a drink, that’s my moment when I turn off. It’s my time.’ And she said, ‘You’re still the fucking mayor!’ I had never thought of that.”

Silbert told me, “I would be trying to get at the feelings, but emotions were not Gavin’s strong suit. He gets excited by ideas, by having achieved thirty-seven per cent of his goals. And in that period there was no policy pathway out. He was just sad and lonely and he drank too much.””

At the time, it was widely reported that Newsom had gone to rehab, something he left “uncorrected” for ten years, though he later acknowledged this counseling did not constitute an alcohol rehabilitation program. Here, again, Newsom gets all worlds: he has struggled with and overcame alcohol abuse but also can still drink and was never an alcoholic.

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Newsom remarried in 2008 and had the first of four children in 2009. As his time as San Francisco mayor was drawing to a close - he had been re-elected with 71 percent during his wild years - Newsom briefly ran for governor of California, but saw the campaign was going nowhere.

He dropped out to run for lieutenant governor, which he won, serving under Jerry Brown who was making a return after almost 30 years away from the governor’s mansion. He then, of course, ran to replace Brown and became the governor of California in 2019.

I think, at this point, anyone sufficiently interested in American politics to have read this far knows enough about Gavin Newsom that I don’t need to extensively describe his tenure as governor. We all know it has been a disaster.

The brutal covid lockdowns and his own dinner at the French Laundry, California losing population for the first time while Texas and Florida made enormous gains, the 2021 failed recall, crime and shit in the streets, budget surplus turned into insane budget deficit, and the ridiculously incompetent response to devastating wildfires. All of these are things which have made people write Newsom off for dead, but, as is the theme here, his inability to feel shame or process narratives have made him immune to devastating coverage from national media and widespread fury from his constituents.

Even I thought he was probably done after this. As of now, it is forgotten.

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This brings us to Newsom’s current moves as he prepares to run for President in 2028…

Newsom’s real strength is going to come from his skill at and love for campaigning. There is nothing better to Newsom than going from person to person selling them on himself. Basically his whole life has been spent trying to convince people he is two things he is not: intelligent and competent. It could be said this is his true passion, at least as near as I can tell.

According to the New Yorker profile, Newsom’s favorite way to campaign is town halls, an unpopular and grueling campaign technique which politicians commonly avoid and then are constantly criticized for avoiding. Many feel they are not that productive, bring out crackpots with an ax to grind, and then create opportunities for bad interactions.

Newsom, with his boxes of notecards, loves them. The New Yorker describes one instance in Fresno where it took him 40 minutes to win over the crowd until an 8 year old girl asked him about gun violence and his answer got loud applause. He can do this all day…

Newsom has been watching Bill Clinton videos for decades, so extensively that aides say this sixth generation Californian sometimes develops an Arkansas twang when he over-studies. One official who knows both men said the difference is this: “Bill Clinton peers deeply into your soul. Gavin peers deeply into the mirror at himself.”

That notwithstanding, technology is waiting for the Clintonian master of the town hall. Instead of the same rallies, it puts Newsom up there day after day talking to people with different problems, put in a line at the microphone, or a group sitting in chairs, or a conversation with a host as the public asks questions. It is constant new content that cannot be replicated by watching a video of a rally. If something goes wrong one day, he can fix it the next day’s cycle…

This is the campaign format made for modern technology. Most importantly, whereas a stump speech will leave positively inclined people thinking, “He understands what I’m going through,” this format accomplishes something even better, “if I spoke to him, he would understand what I am going through.”

He neither knows nor cares what you are going through, but is great at creating the impression that he does.

Gavin Newsom at a town hall in 2018.

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I considered concluding here by restating my initial list of objections in the bullet point format which Governor Newsom prefers and going over why they aren’t a problem for him. But this article is long enough, and I don’t think any merit further explanation.

The point is this: Gavin Newsom cannot be caught with the self-doubt of a normal man or the real problems with his record because he doesn’t care and has a list of semi-relevant facts that will move the conversation forward.

He will not come in as the cursed early front-runner because he has a perpetual underdog complex due to his struggles with literacy and believes his way in life is working harder than everyone else. His campaign style is that when something doesn’t work he just talks to the next person and the next person until something does work.

All of this combined with his undeniable vibes and aura — serial killer vibes and aura, but vibes and aura nonetheless — make him an extraordinarily powerful politician. His authentic shamelessness is perhaps his greatest attribute, because it does not even occur to him that he is humiliating himself by changing positions or being exactly who the audience wants him to be…

He believes in nothing, but his favorite thing to do is ingratiate himself with different groups of people by being who they want him to be. He sells it so hard they don’t even feel like they’ve made him perform a humiliation ritual but that he has simply honored them.

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Gavin Newsom is not a smart man, nor a wise man, nor a competent man, and he is certainly not a moral nor a compassionate man. He is a demonstrably terrible political leader. He is basically just an ambitious sociopath with a learning disability who managed to become immensely powerful due to his coping mechanisms combining with a variety of circumstances beyond his control.

I make no predictions about what will happen in 2028. But I can tell you that he is an extremely potent political force that anyone who wishes to counter underestimates or fails to understand at his own, and America’s, peril.

And yet, for all of that, I somehow like the guy more than I did when I started my research for this article — and enough American voters could learn to love him to put him in the White House.

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(Again, the whole piece is available here. Thanks to Brad for letting me excerpt it.)