California Gov. Gavin Newsom evidently doesn’t have enough to do.
Tens of thousands of people are still displaced by wildfires; thousands more have lost jobs and businesses. The southern half of the state is suffering severe-to-extreme drought, despite late winter rains. The state’s public health care system, Medi-Cal, is nearly insolvent. Homelessness and crime are still major problems; the roads are in disrepair; and the education system is failing the state’s children.
And yet the governor has time to record lengthy podcasts — not just with conservatives, but also failed politicians like former Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, who informed Newsom’s audience that he is more fearsome than the “Make America Great Again” leaders to whom he had lost the 2024 election: “I could kick most of their ass.”
When an incompetent politician develops a distracting hobby — like President Barack Obama playing golf, badly — the upside is that he or she is, at least, not doing whatever damage might be done at the office.
The problem with Newsom’s moonlighting is that as bad as Newsom is, the rest of his administration, and the legislature, is worse.
Like Governor Jerry Brown before him, Newsom is the so-called “adult in the room,” an abysmally low standard, reached by virtue of the complete uselessness of everyone else around him.
When Newsom canceled the wasteful high-speed rail project within weeks of taking office in 2019, there was hope that he might turn out to be a more capable manager than his predecessor. He then doubled down on stupid by trying to keep the train’s rural portion.
That set the tone for the six years to follow. Newsom shows signs of knowing what the right thing to do might be, looking beyond his party’s utopian absurdity. Then he does nothing — or, worse, takes exactly the opposite position.
Another example is his policy on electric vehicles (EVs). In August 2020, in the midst of an acute electricity shortage, Newsom appeared on television to tell Californians that it was time to “sober up” about green energy. Solar energy would not help when it was dark or cloudy; wind energy could not feed the grid in calm conditions.
Mere weeks later, Newsom announced that he planned to ban sales of gas-powered vehicles by 2035 — all talk of sobriety long gone.
Or take water storage. Newsom knows that California needs more reservoirs, and more desalination plants. He has done almost nothing to achieve either. He applauded the Trump administration’s decision to release funds for the Sites Reservoir, which had been approved by the Biden administration. How many more administrations must it take for the reservoir to be built? Perhaps he’s too busy daydreaming about a future Newsom administration to bother.
Newsom is bored with his job. Not because there isn’t anything to do, but because governing does not actually interest him.
He’s not the governor, but he plays one on TV.
He enjoys the aesthetic: the hair, the teeth, the clothes, the fancy dinners. But it’s all an act, and like all acts, it gets old — even for the actor.
So he is already looking for his next role, auditioning to be the Democrats’ next presidential nominee in 2028. Hence the podcast that literally no one needed.
Few would begrudge Newsom a creative outlet if he were actually doing his job. But as I write this article, my home in Pacific Palisades sits empty, surrounded on three sides by the burnt rubble of the recent fire. Many neighbors also lost their insurance before the fire, thanks to Newsom’s policies. One told me this week — nearly three months later — that there are days when she doesn’t know if she’ll get out of bed.
I suppose she could always stay in and enjoy a podcast.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
