Gavin Newsom Uses His Grandstanding Powers for Good
Photo by MSNBC
There are few humans alive who love to perform on camera like California Governor Gavin Newsom does, and up until President Trump invaded Los Angeles over the weekend, Newsom had used this talent to increasingly marginalize himself in the Democratic Party. The governor of the globe’s fifth largest economy who is clearly running for president in 2028 had a pretty straightforward path laid out for him by virtue of his leadership during the pandemic and the power California’s largesse provides him with. No one is better suited to claim they can manage the federal bureaucracy than whoever is overseeing California’s, but Newsom decided that his path to the White House went through interviews with Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon on his right-wing podcast.
But Trump’s illegal acts in Los Angeles, like overruling Newsom’s objections to send in the National Guard without his approval, has created a spectacle tailor made for Newsom to use his grandstanding powers for good. The head of Trump’s immigration gestapo, Tom Homan, said that he will arrest anyone who gets in the way of Stephen Miller’s plan to deport everyone who doesn’t look exactly like him, and when Homan was asked by NBC if his threat to arrest people included Newsom or Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, Homan said “I’ll say it about anybody…It’s a felony to impede law enforcement doing their job.”
This prompted the best thing Newsom has done since he became de facto president of the west coast when Trump abandoned us in the summer of 2020.
Newsom: “Arrest me. Let’s just get it over with, tough guy. I don’t give a damn … Tom, arrest me. Let’s go.”