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Gavin Newsom Claims Working-Class Background, Teases Presidential Run
Gavin Newsom just can’t help himself. He can’t quit claiming that he grew up underprivileged and in virtual poverty.
This is despite the fact that he grew up as the surrogate son of billionaire Gordon Getty. All throughout his 20s, thanks to his bond with Getty, Newsom played the part of a playboy socialite from the upper crust of San Franciscan society. As a young man, Newsom also reaped the full benefits of Getty’s energetic intervention in launching his political career.
Newsom again trotted out his tale of woe and financial struggle during his childhood — something his political advisers have reportedly told him not to do.
Yet on Saturday, Newsom again trotted out his tale of woe and financial struggle during his childhood — something his political advisers have reportedly told him not to do. (RELATED: Gavin Newsom Plots Memoir to Recast Personal Scandals)
In an appearance on the All the Smoke podcast, Newsom spoke of how his mother struggled while working several jobs to financially support him and his sister. Newsom has long pointed to his mother’s several jobs to portray himself as coming from a working-class background, even as his father, William Newsom III, worked as an attorney for the Getty family before becoming a state appellate judge. In his work for the Getty family, William Getty managed the Gordon P. Getty Family trust, which had a total value of $2 billion at the time. (Newsom’s parents divorced when he was young.)
“My mom was 19, pregnant, and divorced a few years later, with two kids,” Newsom said on the All the Smoke podcast Saturday. “Came from no money and just hustled. You know, worked hard, grinding every single day. Two and a half jobs, no bulls**t.”
Newsom continued, “It was also about paying the bills, man. It was just like hustling, and so I was out there, kind of raising myself, turning on the TV, just getting obsessed. I was sitting there with the Wonder Bread.”
Following conservative laughter at Newsom’s comments, a spokesman for the governor told Fox News, “Anyone with more than an inch of curiosity would know that Governor Newsom was raised by his mother after her divorce from his father when he was a toddler. He has talked about moving between two different worlds, but he was raised by a mother who worked three jobs at one point — secretary, waitress, and paralegal.”
In my book, Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power, I chronicled just how much Newsom’s life was shaped by his privilege, even as his father was apparently disinclined to provide adequate child support to the young mother of his two children.
Newsom’s time with his mother, I wrote in my book, was “just one side of Newsom’s childhood.” But, with William, it was quite different. I wrote:
When William had parenting time, Gavin would frequent the opulent Getty estate, blending in with Gordon’s sons as if they were his brothers and forging a relationship with Gordon as if he were Gavin’s true father. When the Getty family took extravagant vacations, Gavin and William joined them. Whether it was an excursion to the Hudson Bay, the Grand Canyon, or Africa, Gavin was invited, paid for, and embraced as an integral part of the Getty family. Newsom was, [San Francisco journalist Peter] Byrne told me, “the equivalent of Gordon Getty’s son.”
Getty, now 91, has never ceased to hold Newsom out to be his own son. And so he did everything he could, in both business and politics, to help Newsom. I wrote:
Gordon continued to regard Gavin as his son even after Gavin reached adulthood. The two spent many evenings drinking together at the Balboa Cafe, according to a San Francisco resident I spoke with who owns a home on the city’s famed Lombard Street. In 1992, when Newsom was twenty-four years old, he launched his first business with Andrew and Billy Getty, Gordon’s biological sons. The business was both financially and strategically underwritten by Gordon Getty, using money from the recently unlocked Getty fortune. Getty later openly admitted that his investment was driven by his paternal affection for Newsom. Newsom named the business PlumpJack Wines & Spirits after an opera Gordon had written.
It was through Gordon Getty and William Newsom’s longstanding relationship with Willie Brown that Newsom was able to enter politics. Because of this relationship, the 27-year-old Newsom held a fundraiser for Brown at PlumpJack Cafe. Soon after his inauguration as mayor, Brown appointed Newsom to the city’s Parking and Traffic Commission.
“This appointment,” I wrote in my book, “served as both a thank you for the successful fundraiser and as a friendly gesture to William Newsom and Gordon Getty. It aligned with Brown’s established practice of giving positions to his friends and benefactors. During his tenure as speaker of the California Assembly, for instance, Brown had appointed Kamala Harris, his former girlfriend, to two state commissions.”
The PlumpJack businesses, for which Gordon Getty was so responsible, were also a key part of preparing Newsom’s political career and pumping up his social image. I wrote:
During this period, the PlumpJack businesses were rapidly gaining renown as the favored gathering places for San Francisco’s high society. In 1996, Billy and Gavin assumed ownership of the Balboa Cafe. Stanlee Gatti, a San Francisco event designer, explained the establishment’s appeal to the New York Times in 1997. “There’s an association with the Gettys — with Billy Getty and Gavin Newsom,” Gatti said. “People do go because it’s kind of cool to go to their joint.” Beyond contributing to his wealth, the businesses advantaged Newsom politically by ensuring that he was recognized throughout the city as the proprietor of the exclusive restaurants.
Newsom quickly continued his climb of the political ladder due to his connections with the political elite, in spite of his youth and lack of experience:
In 1997, a vacancy emerged on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, providing Brown with the opportunity to make an appointment. When deliberating over whom to appoint, Brown consulted with his friend John Burton, with whom he had served on the California Assembly for nearly a decade. Burton shared a close friendship with William Newsom, and this connection spurred Burton to advocate vigorously for the appointment of the glaringly unqualified twenty-eight-year-old Gavin. As the Los Angeles Times put it, Newsom’s “only governmental experience was a six-month sting listening to citizens grumble about bus zones and meter maids.”
Brown’s choice, however, satisfied three of the city’s most powerful men — Gordon Getty, William Newsom, and John Burton — and resonated with the city’s upper class, making it a politically advantageous move. As the Los Angeles Times noted, Newsom’s “telegenic face and slicked back hair [were] fixtures of the society pages.”
Gavin Newsom, a restauranteur in his twenties, had secured a seat on the city council of one of the most populous and affluent cities in the United States—and not a single vote had been cast.
Newsom entered political office entirely indebted to Willie Brown, and, as I explain in my book, it showed. “He’s an appendage of Willie Brown,” said state Senator Quentin Kipp of Newsom’s tenure as supervisor. Not only that, but Newsom’s lack of qualifications was also evident. Soon after his appointment to the Board of Supervisors, Newsom apologized to citizens for not having more concrete ideas on policy and said, “I’ve been learning about politics.”
In Newsom’s campaign to be elected mayor of San Francisco, he secured the full backing of Willie Brown. Though he faced critiques for his potential violations of the Political Reform Act, owing to his acceptance of gifts from Gordon Getty during his time in office, as well as for the revelations of extensive payments from Getty for “investment advice” and substantial investments from Getty in his restaurant businesses, Newsom ultimately triumphed, as he had the entire establishment machine behind him.
We see, therefore, that Newsom is far from a self-made man who rose up from a poor household. He was, rather, given absurd advantages by the billionaire who treats him as his own son. Consider, for instance, Getty’s response when his advantageous loans to Newsom became a point of contention in the mayoral campaign. Getty said, “I have made loans to Gavin, as I would to my own sons.”
*****
On Sunday, Newsom made an appearance on CBS Sunday Morning to announce that he will consider running for the presidency after the 2026 midterms. Of course, Newsom has been seeking the presidency since the 1990s, but this soft announcement helps him prepare more openly for his planned 2028 campaign. (RELATED: Gavin Newsom’s Presidential Campaign Unofficially Begins)
CBS’s Robert Costa, evidently knowing that Newsom was sitting down to make this statement, asked the governor, “Is it fair to say, after the 2026 midterms, you’re going to give [running for president] serious thought?”
Newsom responded, “Yeah, I’d be lying otherwise. I’d just be lying, and I can’t do that.”
“I have no idea,” Newsom further said on whether he will run. “The idea that a guy who got 960 on his SAT, that still struggles to read scripts, that was always in the back of the classroom, the idea that you would even throw that out is, in and of itself, extraordinary. Who the hell knows? I’m looking forward to who presents themselves in 2028 and who meets that moment. And that’s the question for the American people.”
Newsom has evidently learned from his disastrous effort to lay the groundwork to challenge Joe Biden for the presidency in 2024, even while being too scared to publicly admit it. After making denial after denial in response to the dozens of inquiries over whether he would challenge Biden, Newsom jumped into the defensive posture of claiming that he was lockstep with Joe Biden, even to the point that Newsom adamantly supported the cognitively addled Biden’s campaign until nearly its dying breath. (RELATED: Gavin Newsom Breaks With Biden to Set Up Presidential Run)
This time around, Newsom is not lying about his ambitions, and he is leaving no question about his planned 2028 campaign.
Newsom may be better served by adopting that same honesty when it comes to the advantages of his youth rather than claiming to have grown up poor. The extent to which he was helped by Gordon Getty and William Newsom, after all, cannot be hidden. A paid-for $400,000 wedding reception (in today’s money) at the Getty family mansion, to give just one other example, does not in fact give off the air of poverty which Newsom so desperately wishes to project.
Ellie Gardey Holmes is the author of Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power.
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