Newsom fascinates because his slickly ingratiating Californian style combines with such recognizable political calculation and shamelessness.

Allow me to reprint what remains perhaps my single favorite paragraph ever written for National Review, dating all the way back to those young and innocent days of June 2023:

Who among us has not enjoyed observing the perpetually grasping career of Gavin Newsom as he doggedly shucks and slicks his way up to the top of California’s greasy progressive pole? I’ll admit that I’m able to enjoy it more than some because I don’t have to live in California. (Keep in mind: I live in Chicago, Ill.) But Newsom is almost charmingly sleazy in his bearing and conduct, a true visual throwback to a dearly missed Verhoeven Hollywood ’80s style of sinister politician; it is amazingly easy to find images of California’s governor where he looks like the villain from every movie made between 1985–present.

Gavin Newsom has long offered special interest to a political observer, not just because of his importance as California governor, nor even because of his patent ambition to run for the presidency. (With the exception of Hillary Clinton’s two ill-fated campaigns, no Democratic presidential candidacy in recent memory has ever felt more inevitable or been telegraphed for longer than Newsom’s: At this point, if he fails to run I will be forced to conclude that someone has started connecting his name to Bay Area cold-case bodies, regardless of the official line.)

No, Newsom fascinates because his slickly ingratiating Californian style — call this the “Robocop villain” tendency identified above — combines with such recognizable political calculation and shamelessness. Few pols match Newsom’s desperate eagerness for national exposure and relevance beyond the world of California, which he is clearly bored with running. The man throbs with a positively viscous energy, oozing greasy charm and spouting focus-grouped trifles with practiced smoothness as he pivots here or tweaks his message there every few months or so to remain “viable” in 2028. The entire thing is an act, of course, the affect of a political shape-shifter willing to don any mask of temporary convenience to gain power, yet ultimately committed to progressive politics.

Newsom’s only permanent quality, seemingly, is an unquenchable desperation for relevance. When he ran for his second term as governor in 2022 — after surviving a pointlessly doomed recall campaign election in 2021 that only strengthened him politically within California — he did so as an avatar of both the “Resistance” as well as stringent Covid lockdown protocols (protocols that he himself infamously failed to observe, without serious penalty). He was perfectly in tune with where he believed the national Democratic Party to be, and eager to position himself as the Democrats’ next most like likely leader after Joe Biden, who — it is often forgotten — was expected by many to voluntarily step aside after the midterms.

As long as it looked like Biden might leave the race, there Newsom was, proposing a “28th Amendment” — gun control, naturally — for no other reason than to keep his name fresh in the headlines for progressives who might be considering him a year later. After Biden determined to launch his kamikaze run into history, there Newsom was, instead laughably challenging Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida to a televised debate in November 2023. It was the shadow matchup Newsom had always dreamed of — Newsom’s Hollywood-ready glitz next to DeSantis’s humorless wonkishness — but remarkably, DeSantis ran rings around Newsom in that encounter, demonstrating the limits of Newsom’s charisma when faced with losing issues. (One has to keep one’s Q rating up somehow regardless, I suppose.)

Now in the aftermath of Trump’s reelection, driven by a wave of economic and anti-woke defections from formerly Democratic blue-collar voters and young men, here comes Podcaster Gavin Newsom. How better the reach The Kids These Days than with this new fad everybody’s doing? Honestly, I can think of few things young men are less interested in than listening to This Is Gavin Newsom, where the avuncular and publicity-hungry governor talks politics for an hour, but bored journalists are another matter entirely.

Newsom certainly garnered headlines upon launch by debuting with Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk. He made waves by conceding to Kirk on that debut episode that he himself was opposed to the idea of biological men participating in women’s sports. Here, we were given to understand, was the unveiling of Newsom’s new post-2024 “liberal centrist” brand: backing away from the extreme cultural liberalism that had alienated Hispanics and young men in equal measure from the Democratic Party they had once called home, and pinning down a “common-sense” progressive position instead.

But, as ex-colleague John McCormack (now with The Dispatch) reports in his detailed exploration of Newsom’s political history this week, this too is a yet another pretense: After receiving predictable criticism — including garment-rending peals of betrayal from the eternally voluble transgender lobby within his own party — Newsom is no longer bothering to even assume a virtue he has always pointedly lacked. In an April 2 press conference, he backed down from his position on transgender participation in women’s athletics, saying that — by gum — he just couldn’t figure out a way to square the circle:

“We tried to figure out how to balance this. Is there a way to make this work?” Newsom said of the competing interests at play. “We literally were talking to some International Olympic Committee experts. . . . We were trying to figure this out, and couldn’t figure it out. And that’s my point of view—that I just couldn’t figure out how to, quote, unquote, make this fair.”

There is, of course, an extremely easy way to solve this problem that would work for the vast majority of all people: Forbid biological men from participating in women’s sports, without exception. Newsom’s craven attempt to have it both ways on an 80/20 issue like this — “I know it’s wrong, but there’s nothing I can do about it without being unfair” — is if nothing else a perfect indication of the kind of a politician he really is: one with an extremely close eye on which side his bread his buttered. (Never forget: This is the man who appointed the president of EMILY’s List — a Silver Spring, Md., resident, no less — to fill Dianne Feinstein’s vacant Senate seat for a year, because he knows exactly whom he wants to owe him favors when the time comes.)

You will never pin Gavin Newsom down on any genuinely heterodox policy position that breaks with the real activist powers within his own party. You shouldn’t expect to, either: Newsom is a white man competing in what is sure to be a progressive 2028 primary electorate. What you should be aware of is that no matter how seemingly sincere he may be in his attempts to appeal to centrists, he will never take those positions in any way that could nail him down. You might as well try nailing jelly to a tree.