The only Democrat more delusional than those who forgot that they used to have their own Joe Rogan is Gavin Newsom. He somehow believes that he’s the man to replace the podcast luminary that was a Bernie Sanders backer and lifelong liberal until the Left lost its mind.
Undaunted by managing the single most populous state in the republic, the California governor is launching a brand-new, “Bill Maher-inspired” podcast called “This is Gavin Newsom.” Produced by iHeartPodcasts, Newsom’s show will feature sparring with various politicos, including supporters of President Donald Trump that he claims come from “the lineup at CPAC.”
“At the same time, I want Democrats to come on and sort of challenge where we are on a lot of these issues,” mused Newsom during an exclusive with POLITICO. “And so I’m asking the same questions you’re asking of me: Where the hell is the Democratic Party? What are we doing? Who are we? Where are we going? What’s the path back? I’m having the exact same conversations, and I just thought it’d be a hell of a lot more interesting to do it publicly and to do it as honestly as I can.”
The laugh-out-loud hilarity of Newsom’s latest gambit is not that this silver spoon protege of the Getty dynasty considers himself as relatable as Rogan, the blue comedian who explicitly embraces blue collar audiences outside of elite and academic echelons. The joke is also not that Newsom has the hubris to believe he has a mind made for audio programming without the telegenic face for TV. (Then-Lieutenant Gov. Newsom hosted his own talk show on local television from 2012 to 2023.) Nor that literally any average Joe outside of San Francisco and Sacramento’s upper crust is better suited to explain to Democrats how they lost touch with the rest of America.
Instead, the slapstick and side-splitting irony of Newsom’s gall is that he thinks he can rival the world’s most popular podcast host to single handedly solve the existential unpopularity of his party while California quite literally burns and bankrupts itself into apocalypse.
Just since the start of the year, more than 18,000 buildings and 57,000 acres have been demolished and nearly a quarter-million Californians have been displaced due to more than a dozen disastrous wildfires, two of which were the second and third most destructive wildfires in the state’s history. Almost half a million residents were left without power temporarily, but the total estimated economic losses, which now amount to an estimated quarter-trillion dollars, will prove persistent. The housing and insurance industries, already under strain from sky-high demand, were dealt a death knell in the form of a supply shock. Insurers are fighting for scraps to recoup their losses from the fires, and the survivors who cannot afford to leave California altogether will be further priced out of the safer shoreline by the state’s anti-growth zoning regulations and into the fire-prone tinderbox of the wildland-urban interface.
Crisis indicators were blaring long before this year’s wildfires. California’s population has shrunk by 1% since 2020, the Golden State’s first contraction since before the Civil War — when it wasn’t yet a state. California’s job growth, economic growth, and real wage growth have all lagged behind the national average since the pandemic. And as soon as the next fiscal year, the state’s deficit is projected to balloon to $30 billion. No state but Nevada has a higher unemployment rate. Include the underemployed and those marginally attached to the labor force, and California’s U-6 unemployment rate shoots up to the double digits.
None of this is to mention the long-running exodus of Californians who lost their last nerve over the traffic, taxes, recurring natural disasters, and subsequent rolling blackouts long ago. I count myself among the California refugees who may miss the taco trucks but not the $5 gallons of gas and $9 cartons of eggs.
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Newsom’s solution, of course, is to beg Trump to maintain the grift. In response to the wildfires, Newsom asked Trump for $40 billion. That’s on top of the one-third of the state budget that comes from the federal government. Two-thirds of that funding goes to California’s socialized healthcare system, Medi-Cal, which covers more than one-third of the state’s residents. Even before Newsom expanded Medi-Cal eligibility to cover illegal immigrants regardless of age in 2024, the Federation for American Immigration Reform estimated that California taxpayers spent nearly $31 billion on illegal aliens. Now Medi-Cal, with full federal subsidies, covers more than one million illegal aliens.
What do you do when you’ve presided over the slow-running suicide of the fifth-largest economy in the world? Start a podcast to solve your party’s own self-inflicted identity crisis, of course. At least Emperor Nero had the good sense to break out a fiddle while Rome burned. Emperor Newsom’s podcast could hardly be less tone-deaf.