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Victor Davis Hanson: Newsom’s Rocky Month Shows the Risks of Running on Style Over Substance
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.
Gavin Newsom, the governor of our state here in California, and the presumptive front-runner in the Democratic presidential primary for 2028—I am biased because I’ve had to live under his tenure for six years—but I think you could make the argument he had the worst February of any major want-to-be candidate in modern memory, or surely the worst record of any governor in the last 30 days.
It wasn’t supposed to be that way. He has a new autobiography, and his problem there is he comes across as what he is: a child of privilege, a nepo baby, a person whose father was a close, intimate friend of Gov. Pat Brown, senior Gov. Pat Brown. He was a good friend and somewhat related to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and former Gov. Jerry Brown. And of course, he was subsidized and helped in his business venture by the Getty family and their mega-oil fortune inherited from their father, who created Getty Oil. So, he wants to dispel that image.
So, when he talked about how he just ate white bread or he had all of these problems growing up—he said he had dyslexia. We’ll get to that in a minute. But the idea that Gavin Newsom was somehow parallel to former President Abraham Lincoln in a log cabin or Vice President JD Vance just doesn’t work.
Then he went over to Munich, Germany, because, you know, he’s a California governor. He doesn’t have any foreign experience, and he thought he was going to impress the Europeans with their shared dislike of President Donald Trump. But it was a disaster.
He said something about you shouldn’t wear knee pads. He’s a vulgarian. He really is. He can’t keep his potty mouth clean. I don’t think anybody at that type of serious discussion of foreign policy wants some upstart California governor to come over and talk about people being on their knee pads. I suppose that’s a reference for a sexual act of submission.
Then he’s had this social media team, and their theory is that Donald Trump—with his capital letters, exclamation points, personal ad hominem attacks—has upped his popularity. And therefore, he’s going to imitate Donald Trump’s style with capital letters, the same format, but he’s going to use a constant level of pejoratives that are obscene, almost pornographic. And then, therefore, he will outtrump Trump. He has a fundamental failing, everybody, and you know that.
You will vote for Donald Trump because of his record and his courage and breaking existing norms and taboos and trying to do things that no one ever did. Like close the border, stop crime, deal with the Left, the Department of Government Efficiency, deal with the Iranians, deal with Venezuela. And the tweets in which he describes that are attacks of Robert De Niro or—that’s something that you will tolerate despite, not because of, those tweets.
Gavin Newsom got it all wrong. He thought, well, Trump is doing well because of his tweets, and I’m gonna be outtrumping Trump. And the result is he’s unleashed this unfortunate character. I think he’s called Izzy Gardon. I don’t know how you pronounce it, but my gosh, they’re full of expletives.
He’s in a tweet war with Sean Hannity. He used the F-word. He used the S-word. They come out of the mouth of the governor of California like they’re nothing. He’s really debased the office. He’s got one of the most foul mouths, Gavin Newsom, and now you’re putting it, if I could use that archaic term, in print, in these social media, daily outbursts.
You know, there was a simple reporter, Susan Crabtree. She has a very good reputation. She works for RealClearPolitics, and getting back to dyslexia, she says, all of a sudden, you’re emphasizing dyslexia. But we would like to know when he was officially diagnosed with this medical condition. And his social media, Gardon, Izzy, said F off to a reporter, which didn’t go down well.
As far as dyslexia goes, it’s very hard to find him credible. Not that he doesn’t have it, but when he says, “I can’t read,” I can’t believe that’s true, because not too long ago, he bragged to us, I think, that he was reading a 260-page book in an hour and a half, as if he was a speed-reader.
And my gosh, anybody who is a governor of a huge state like California, a governor of any state, gets page after page daily in memoranda and policy papers and speeches. So, when he says he can’t read, it wouldn’t convince most people.
And why did he say that he couldn’t read? Because he’s flailing, and he wants to have some sympathy. I think that’s the reason.
The same thing—he wants to be a pseudo-poor boy. When Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said you were historically illiterate, and Newsom again fired from the hip and said that Trump had no historical precedent or right to bring in federal troops, that’s happened five or six times in our history. Civil War draft riots; World War I veterans marching for their bonuses they didn’t receive; Rodney King riots, where then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell sent in, I think, 4,000 or 5,000 Marines on the order of then-President George H.W. Bush.
And so, Ted Cruz said, Gavin, you’re historically illiterate. And sure enough, he says, how dare you make fun of a person with a handicap because I’m—you’re saying that I’m illiterate because I can’t read. Of course, being historically illiterate means you’re able to read, you just don’t read history, or you would’ve not made such a blunder. And he confused that. Again, the subtext was, please feel sorry for me because otherwise I have no redeeming values as a candidate.
And then he made the faux pas of all mistakes. He got before an African American audience. And remember, every time a Democratic white elite gets in front of an African American audience, something happens. They either feel uncomfortable or they want to fake it like they’re somebody they’re not, or they’re condescending, or they—it just doesn’t work well.
Remember former President Joe Biden, when he wanted to attack former Sen. Mitt Romney. He said to a group of highly educated, professional blacks in the audience that Mitt Romney’s “gonna put you all [back] in chains.” He kind of did the accent. “Put you all in”—as if these capable people couldn’t protect themselves without Joe Biden. As if we were gonna go back to slavery.
When we had former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, remember, I tried so—“I didn’t come this far.” She was trying to imitate, I guess, the voice she thought Sojourner Truth or Harriet Tubman would’ve said, somebody like that. It was a disaster. Even former President Barack Obama, who’s half African American, always went into a different patois to condescend to his audience.
And that’s exactly what Gavin Newsom did, only it was worse because it was content, not just style. He was speaking very slowly and changed his cadence. But when he said to them, I am not—I’m just like you. Basically, I am illiterate, and I had a 960, and I’m not saying I had a 960 to make you out there in the audience have 940, that was an insult because he was saying to them: You are not very bright, and therefore, you should feel empathy with me because I’m claiming that I’m not very bright, but I really don’t believe it. And they don’t believe that he really meant that either. So, it was completely racist and insulting.
It’s up there with Joe Biden’s “Corn Pop” sagas, you know. Barack Obama’s the first black who’s clean and can articulate. It’s up there with his use of “boy” and “Negro.” As I said, all of these politicians have a checkered record when it comes to race, which is ironic because they pose as defenders of civil rights.
Finally, what’s the elephant in the room? All of what I talked about is a camouflage, a mask for the problem. And that is 300,000 people are leaving his state per year since he’s been governor. He’s taken paradise and turned it into purgatory. Whether it’s the fires, the high-speed rail boondoggle, the highest income taxes in the nation, the recent billionaires tax—it’s already driven $1 trillion out of the state.
We have the highest number of homeless people. We have one-third of all welfare recipients. We have the highest poverty rate, I think we’re 21% to 22%. We have no plans to assimilate a culture rate or integrate 27% of the population that was foreign-born. We have the highest number of illegal aliens. About one out of every three people that enters our now-bankrupt health system has diabetes. And Louisiana and Mississippi have higher test scores in their elementary schools than we do.
Add it all up, and he’s got only one campaign slogan. Gavin Newsom will have to run as “I want to do to the United States what I did to California.” We’ll see how that works out.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
The post Victor Davis Hanson: Newsom’s Rocky Month Shows the Risks of Running on Style Over Substance appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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