If watching news coverage of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s melodramatic remarks on Tuesday night is giving you deja vu, you’re not alone. It really is exactly like what the dying media tried doing with Kamala Harris last year.
Newsom’s eight-minute, technical-glitch-ridden speech could have been about his administration’s efforts to quell the violent and destructive riots rocking his state since Friday, or it could have been about measures to cooperate with the White House to make illegal alien deportations more orderly, but that would have been productive. Instead, the governor —perpetually in vocal fry — titled his speech “Democracy at a Crossroads” and bemoaned the federal agents engaged in law enforcement and President Trump for, as Newsom put it, “traumatizing our communities.” And, of course, he said it was all a threat to democracy.
“Democracy is under assault right before our eyes,” Newsom said. “The moment we’ve feared has arrived. He’s taking a wrecking ball to our founding fathers’ historic project.”
Other nauseating lines from Newsom’s speech:
— “He’s delegitimizing news organizations and assaulting the First Amendment.”
— “At the threat of defunding them, he’s dictating what universities can teach.”
— “Targeting law firms and the judicial branch that are the foundation of an orderly, civil society.”
— “The rule of law has increasingly given way to the rule of Don.”
Sir, what about the bonfires downtown? Democracy is at stake! A republic, if you can keep it! No one is above the law!
If I told you any of Newsom’s remarks were from some Kamala 2024 campaign speech, you’d have no doubt. It’s the exact type of corny, delusional, patronizing rot she regurgitated for months. Thinking it was over turned out to be a mistake. Democrats and the media are ready to microwave the same strategy in 2028 — except with a white man instead of a somewhat black woman.
The New York Times said it was “hard to watch the speech … and not wonder if the 2028 campaign had already begun.” Meidas Touch, the popular “resistance” account on X, called Newsom’s remarks “powerful and urgent” (the account’s post of the speech garnered half a million views). Fire-breathing Democrat Ana Navarro nearly collapsed into a wet mess over Newsom’s display. “I have been so thirsty,” she said on CNN, “for somebody that is not cowardly, bending the knee and selling out to Donald Trump as he does all of this to America.”
I know an effective speech when I see one. And I mean genuinely effective, as in with nonpartisan voters, and not just whatever quenches Ana Navarro’s thirst. Democrat Sen. Elissa Slotkin from Michigan delivered a very good rebuttal speech to President Trump’s address to Congress in March (though it was good precisely because she largely stayed away from the mind-numbing content Newsom was blurting). What Newsom did was not that, and I’m not convinced even partisan Democrats outside of the media cared for it.
They heard all of it in the last election. And they lost. True, Newsom is white and he’s a man and that distinguishes him from Kamala Harris, but he’s otherwise essentially the same person.
Kamala didn’t believe anything, which is why she took the opposite side of all of her major positions three months ahead of the election. Newsom doesn’t believe anything, which is why he’ll attempt to do the same if he’s able to secure the Democrat nomination.
Newsom is 2024 all over again.
Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of "Liberal Misery: How the Hateful Left Sucks Joy Out of Everything and Everyone."