Gavin Newsom Is Meeting the Moment

By Jacob Weindling | August 15, 2025 | 3:06pm

Screenshot via ABC News

Congress Gavin Newsom

We live in the “the worst person you know just made a great point” era, as I used former Iraq War cheerleader Bill Kristol as a bizarro world example of what a mostly productive version of Hillary Clinton may look like earlier today. His coalition of interventionists at The Bulwark is doing genuine good work to drag moderates and actual conservatives away from Trumpism. This makes Bill fucking Kristol, a man who helped George W. Bush lead us into Iraq and who to my internet search, has never fully atoned for this sin and only doubled down on it, far more productive than Hillary Clinton to the present anti-Trump cause because at least he fervently supports abolishing Trump’s gestapo at the Department of Homeland Security, while her bipartisan brain just endorsed giving Trump the Nobel Peace Prize under a qualifier that will never happen.

We have a similar Kristol-style situation developing now with Gavin Newsom, one of the Democratic Party’s most cynical and camera-hungry hairpieces, who is doing what Congressional Democrats have not: understanding and utilizing his vast power enshrined in the United States Constitution. Newsom countering Texas’s gambit to steal five seats for the GOP’s Congressional coalition by calling an election over whether to find extra seats in California is genuinely patriotic, and his budding Shadow Cabinet with Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and New York Governor Kathy Hochul has emerged as the first true countervailing force with teeth in the Democratic Party. This Texas redistricting diktat from the GOP’s God-King is dangerous stuff, as this is the actual way you rig elections in America, not the hysteric Qanon-esque conspiracy theory about 2024 voting machines festering around parts of the left.

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Yes Trumpers, Newsom’s gambit to give Democrats more representation in Congress by potentially squeezing extra seats out of his powerful blue state is a threat to democracy too. Pritzker can and may do the same in Illinois, and Hochul is also open to exploring it in the midst of her own “worst person you know” babyface turn in New York en route to rising poll numbers. Republicans do not have the dominant hand they think they do in this redistricting situation right now, should these three powerful Democratic governors actually follow through on their counter-threats, which they likely would not do if they did not think their voters will back them up.

The difference between the GOP’s Trump-mandated redistricting scam and the potential Newsom-Pritzker-Hochul alliance to counteract it is that the latter comes with a call from Newsom to end this madness when the next census is taken in 2030, and join the rest of the world in passing national redistricting reform where independent commissions draw legislative districts, not political parties. Democrats love to talk a big game on coming together to discuss bipartisan common-sense reform and blah blah blah, but this gambit actually forces Republicans to come to the table by aligning their interests towards appointing an independent redistricting commission, or continuing this tedious legislative tit for tat warfare.

It also has the potential to backfire should this redistricting fight go full thermonuclear legislative warfare. FiveThirtyEight simulated that given Republican control of states in 2018, they would come out far ahead in any fully unhinged partisan redistricting fight, and Republicans still control 23 states to the Democrats’ 15 today. But even if we reached that democracy-breaking point, it likely just suggests we were headed there anyway, so at least this route creates a rallying cry around a high-profile event where Democrats can rightly tell tens of millions of people that they have been disenfranchised by the Republican Party, and the Democratic Party is truly fighting for them.

Not only is Newsom doing the most important thing—using his power—but he’s also excelling at the less vital but still intrinsic rhetorical aspect of politics that animates much of the Democratic Party. He’s not being shy about dramatically describing this as a battle for democracy, because it is. This is the kind of message the Democratic Party has been demanding from its feckless New York-based Congressional leadership, en route to the lowest approval rating for the party on record.

Newsom: “Wake up, America. If he rigs this election, you won’t have a country anymore.”

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— Olga Nesterova (@onestpress.onestnetwork.com) August 14, 2025 at 4:01 PM

This is all great stuff from Newsom. We are in a fight for our democracy. Project 2025 is very clear about its goal to establish an autocracy, and the Palantir-adjacent tech overlords funding this authoritarian rise have been open in their desire to crown a CEO King in America. This is happening. Fascism can happen anywhere. It’s already happened here, and it is happening again. Hitler cited America as inspiration for Nazi Germany, and Trump is weaponizing deep historical forces that this country fought a Civil War over. What Newsom is doing right now is proving that the Civil War never really ended, it just shifted into a Cold Civil War that legislatively is turning hot again.

Trump is staging his goons outside a media event announcing legislation that is perfectly legal under the United States Constitution, openly threatening to turn it back into a hot war. He is in no uncertain terms expressing the stakes of this fight through his displays of military force and the federally mandated occupation of two major blue cities. History tells us these kinds of acts almost always come from a point of immense weakness that portend long-term doom for the regime, and we all can see this weakness with our own eyes and ears both in the culture and the mountain of polling demonstrating how unpopular Trump is. Some politician will eventually be smart enough to pick up this gigantic number of voters just sitting on the ground in the party, begging for someone–anyone–to fight back.

And Gavin Newsom, currently running the most telegraphed 2028 presidential campaign to date, is pressuring J.B. Prtizker and Kathy Hochul into essentially adopting the title of co-presidents of small-d democratic America in a clear bid to win the dismayed fighters wing of the party. Congressional Democrats have long acted like any form of conflict is a guaranteed loser for a party driven by a cowardly Epstein-adjacent elite, and the GOP freakout over Newsom punching back, with potentially an avalanche of blue seats lined up behind him to turn this tide at the open of this fight, proves the folly of this strategy. As the worst person California knows rightly said, it’s time to “fight fire with fire,” and the only way to properly present this battle to America is to indulge Trump in the logical conclusion of our miserable form of Congressional district creation, and give him what he wants while offering everyone a vote on it and a long-term path out of this madness through independent redistricting commissions.

To be clear, he is also earning the worst person you know moniker. Gavin Newsom is still launching rhetorical attacks on trans people in his braindead bid to become a podcast bro and win some of Trump’s low info 2024 coalition in 2028. He’s clearly betting he can win more dudebros who don’t know when election day is than he will lose dependable pro-trans voters and trans voters themselves, which is the classic mistake of taking their base for granted that Democrats love to make. It is a long way to 2028, and Newsom will have to answer for this cynical mission to further marginalize one of America’s most marginalized groups to his supposed electoral benefit, but for right now, Trump has created a crisis that has aligned this craven politician’s interests in a way where he’s utilizing his immense power atop the globe’s fourth largest economy to fight an authoritarian lurch that would enable the GOP to further impose Project 2025’s depravity.

Trump is showing off 2028 campaign gear to White House visitors–this isn’t subtle–and the GOP is planning to establish Trump as America’s Ayatollah with larger Congressional majorities after 2026. For now, Newsom is doing a really good job of meeting the moment and fighting back in ways both tangible and metaphorical. I regret to inform you that one of the worst people we know is making great points and being a true leader in an age desperate for them, proving how low the bar is to clear in the modern Democratic Party.