Gavin’s Last Gasp

M ost Americans do not follow the nitty-gritty of California politics. They are thus likely unaware of just how close Governor Gavin Newsom is to “crashing out.” He has stacked failures on top of failures. He is angering both liberals and conservatives. And his prospects for the presidency — and, thereby, any continuing political relevance — are fading away.

That’s why Newsom is jumping into his antagonistic posture against President Trump on immigration enforcement. The only way Gavin Newsom can credibly forge any kind of political future is if he can turn himself into the country’s leading anti-Trump, “No Kings” hero.

2025 has not been kind to Gavin Newsom. The year started with horrific wildfires in Los Angeles, the most destructive in California’s history. While the fires and their aftermath were the nation’s first glimpse of the disastrous incompetence of America’s Worst Mayor, Karen Bass, they also demonstrated the ineffectiveness of the measures to curb wildfires that Newsom put in place after the disastrous fire seasons in 2019 and 2020. He knew wildfires were a problem. But he did not do what was necessary to stop them.

Newsom’s efforts to spread his “brand” nationwide this year have been a train wreck. His This Is Gavin Newsom podcast has gone the way of most celebrity podcasts: huge numbers and headlines in the first episodes, followed by a rapid decline in interest and listeners. Liberals in California are bitter that he kept interviewing conservatives like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon. Furthermore, his patently insincere flip-flop on transgenderism in sports during his first episode gained him no good will: Liberals are mad that he backtracked, while conservatives are mad that he has done nothing to address the ongoing problem.

Before the riots broke out, California’s budget was the crisis du jour for Newsom, and it is still a thorn in his side. Last month, the governor released the post–Tax Day revision to his 2025–2026 budget proposal. It revealed what a fiscal disaster his six years in office have been. The revision tries to close the gap on what became a  $12 billion deficit for a $229 billion budget. Worse, Newsom’s own budget analysts confirmed that California is facing “structural deficits” of $15–20 billion per year — i.e., an enduring, consistent state of spending commitments exceeding year-over-year revenues. Over his time as governor, Newsom increased spending by an average of 9 percent per year, while revenues increased by an average of 6 percent.

To deal with this problem, Newsom had to do something else politically damaging: cut back his own expansion of Medi-Cal (California’s Medicaid program) to illegal aliens, which drove this year’s deficit far higher than Newsom expected. It is a problem that, yet again, angers everybody. The left is outraged at the withdrawal of care from this “vulnerable community.” The right is outraged he ever expanded Medi-Cal to illegals in the first place. And the center is outraged at the bumbling profligacy of it all. Fully 58 percent of Californians — yes, the same Californians who favored Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by 20 points — do not support giving health insurance to illegal aliens.

Wildfires, deficits, flip-flopping: these examples highlight the most damaging aspect of Newsom’s failures — that they are nonpartisan. Newsom is unpopular (his California approval rating has dropped to an anemic 44 percent) not because he has enacted extremely liberal policies that the left loves but that moderates and the right deplore. Rather, his failures relate to things that everyone acknowledges as bad.

All of Newsom’s failures have this nonpartisan character. Nobody likes homelessness. Yet Newsom improvidently spent $24 billion on the problem with no trackable results. The state’s high-speed rail project has exactly as much operable track today as it did when he ran for governor in 2018 (0.0 inches), and there is no credible financial path to completing the project by its current 2033 deadline. After Newsom pushed and signed legislation last year to increase regulatory burdens on oil refineries, two refineries have announced that they are closing, which will limit supply and cause California gas prices to skyrocket to $8 per gallon next year.

New housing construction – a supposedly urgent priority that Newsom has not adequately addressed for six years — moves at a snail’s pace, even for homes destroyed in the January Los Angeles wildfires. Local governments, following onerous state laws that slow down permitting and construction throughout the state, have only been able to issue 21 new permits to rebuild the 9,400 structures destroyed by the Altadena wildfire. The Dallas-Fort Worth metro area builds more homes per year than the entire state of California. California has the highest poverty rate in America, along with some of the highest taxes in America. It is losing population, taxpayers, and businesses.

With this record in mind, imagine Gavin Newsom on a Democratic primary debate stage in late 2027 on CNN or MSNBC. He turns his perfectly quaffed head, opens up his veneers, and makes a snake-oil pitch for how his experience governing the world’s fourth-largest economy qualifies him to serve as president.

But then, an ambitious opponent (perhaps Josh Shapiro or John Fetterman) jumps in to recreate the moment when Tulsi Gabbard ended Kamala Harris’ presidential bid in 2019. The nonpartisan nature of Newsom’s failures allows even fellow liberals to skewer him, on issue after issue. Newsom might be able to spin his way out of any one of those problems, but he cannot escape the full lineup.

All of this is why Newsom needs to jump into this immigration fight. Newsom is a lame duck in California. He has angered organized labor, the abortion industry, environmentalist groups, state employees, lawmakers, and more. The two U.S. Senate seats in California are closed off to him: Adam Schiff was just elected in 2024, and Newsom himself appointed Alex Padilla to replace Kamala Harris in 2021. His only road to political relevance is the presidency. And it will be near-impossible for him to even get nominated with his disastrous record. He only has 18 months left as governor to clean up the messes he has made or exacerbated. It is doubtful how much progress he can make in that time.

His last, best shot is to do something that galvanizes Democrats to rally around him, to make himself a hero to liberals nationwide for the one issue that looms largest in Democrats’ minds: stopping Donald Trump. He must get into, and win, a political showdown with Trump, preferably with an issue where he can look like a sympathetic fighter-victim against Trump’s (alleged) king-like authoritarianism. Hence his faux-emotional “Democracy at a Crossroads” speech to announce his dramatic lawsuit against Trump’s activation of the California National Guard.

Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta did some nifty forum-shopping by filing the legal challenge in the Northern District of California. The court is based in San Francisco, a seven-hour drive north of the riots. But it is a reliably left-wing district where 63 of the 65 judges are Democrat appointees.

Judge Charles Breyer did not disappoint. He immediately halted Trump’s activation of the National Guard while parroting the political rhetoric of the “No Kings” protests that took place last weekend. The Ninth Circuit immediately reversed his decision via a three-judge panel that included two Trump appointees.

The push to stop Trump in the courts may be unlikely to succeed, but the lawsuit provides political opportunities for Newsom. Judge Breyer will give reliably left-wing opinions that Newsom can trumpet to play up Trump’s authoritarianism, even if (perhaps especially if) Breyer is ultimately overruled by more Trump-appointed judges on the 9th Circuit or Supreme Court. King Trump’s authoritarianism, Newsom will argue, has “packed the courts” with lackeys ready to do his bidding.

NR’s Rich Lowry asked on a recent episode of The Editors: Will Newsom get himself arrested? I don’t think it will happen, but it’s certainly an outcome Newsom wants, and should want. Making himself an anti-Trump martyr — through political rhetoric, legal challenges, or any other means — is Newsom’s only path to continuing relevance. His own failures have closed off all other avenues.