California’s governor challenges the usual criteria for a presidential nominee
By Frank Bruni
President Trump sucks up so much oxygen that there’s often little left for other politicians, but lately, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California has been getting a hefty share of spare air. That’s partly because of his just-published memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry,” which he has been promoting relentlessly. But it’s also because he’s such a practiced peacock. He knows how to strut.
Newsom’s manner of plumage and magnitude of ambition have typically turned me off. They’re a warning: Here’s a bird with too much ego (or insecurity), a creature who craves affirmation too keenly and chases it too furiously to hold on to principle.
But these days? There’s more competition for attention than ever. More noise. Can someone conflicted about the spectacle of campaigning and the grind of the presidency — a normal human making a nuanced plea in a measured voice — prevail in an ALLCAPS age?
I don’t know. But it’s a question we need to consider as various Democrats intensify their auditions for 2028.
The casting call has certainly begun. A month before Newsom released “Young Man in a Hurry,” Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, released “Where We Keep the Light,” a book in which he, too, invites the kind of biographical examination that shouts presidential aspirations. Maybe both Democrats got the writing bug at the same time. Or maybe they looked at their calendars, realized that speculation about 2028 would grow a whole lot louder right about now and decided to lay down their markers.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, shares their sense of timing. About two weeks ago she jetted off to Germany, and it wasn’t for pretzels and beer. It was for the Munich Security Conference and an opportunity to signal the kind of interest in foreign policy that serves a contender for higher office well.
Newsom, Shapiro and Ocasio-Cortez belong to a plethora of potential contestants for the Democratic presidential nomination, and from this point forward, those of us desperate for a winner — for whoever’s the best bet to contain Trumpism and steer this country back to a better track — will be sizing up the possibilities ever more closely.
But the criteria for judgment and the dynamics feel different than in elections past. At least for me they do. In the before times, I was very wary of candidates whose quest for the presidency seemed too insistent and all-consuming, who had been nursing the dream for too long and clinging to it too tightly. I worried that such single-mindedness erased any space for subtlety, for introspection, for ambivalence, for the crucially instructive mess of an unscripted life.
And would voters relate to it? Part of what drew many Democrats I know to Barack Obama was that he seemed to be working through decidedly mixed feelings about his quest for the presidency — as most well-adjusted people would be. Part of what drew many Republicans I know to George W. Bush was that he seemed less comfortable on the campaign trail than on his ranch.
It was a Goldilocks thing. Too little ardor for the White House was a nonstarter, given the slog to get there. Too much could be a turnoff, given how cold and calculating it can make someone. But a longing at once robust and restrained? That was just right.
Newsom seems entirely unrestrained and wholly immodest, his confession of a 960 on his SAT notwithstanding. He has long struck me that way. I routinely flash back to that staggeringly vainglorious article and photo shoot in Harper’s Bazaar that he and his first wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle, consented to in 2004, when he was mayor of San Francisco. “The New Kennedys” — that was the article’s title. And the couple’s many comely poses included one in which they were stretched out together — spooning, essentially — on a fancy rug in a gilded room with a Pacific panorama behind them.
But while I once considered that image a political liability, now I’m not so sure. Yes, it reeks of self-love. But it also announces that he came to play. That he’s ready to rule. It’s a positively Trumpian promise of dominance. Maybe that’s what Democrats feel they need.
A survey that Emerson College Polling released last week put Newsom ahead of other possible Democratic presidential candidates; he got the support of 20 percent of likely Democratic voters. Pete Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary, finished second, with 16 percent, while former Vice President Kamala Harris was third with 13 percent and Ocasio-Cortez fourth with 9 percent.
Meanwhile, prediction markets, which tend to reflect conventional wisdom, give Newsom a big early lead among Democrats, and he was the first pick in a fantasy-style draft of potential Democratic presidential candidates that Nate Silver participated in and discussed with The Times recently.
I fear that in a general election, Newsom could be badly hobbled by some of the more progressive positions that he has taken as governor of California and by the ease with which the state can be caricatured as a crushingly expensive theater of regulatory excess. California lost population between July 2024 and July 2025, as more people left it than left any other state.
I can’t tell where he’d land, policy-wise, as a president, because on taxes, trans rights and other issues, he has sent confusing signals over recent years. And I generally prefer politicians who fly at a less flamboyant altitude, with a better ear for how Americans of less privilege live. Two Democratic governors confronted blowback for dining out in groups during a period of the pandemic when they were instructing constituents to avoid large public gatherings: Newsom, who ate at the vaunted French Laundry in the Napa Valley, and Gretchen Whitmer, who ate at a bar and grill in East Lansing, Mich., the state she leads. That contrast flatters her.
But Newsom’s strut is working for him. It goes hand in hand with his undeniable talent for picking fights, be it his feud (and televised debate) with Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, about two years ago, his successful battle last year to redraw the congressional map in California or his continued, popular mockery of Trump on social media. Let Bernie Sanders orate about oligarchy. Newsom’s a meme machine.
It’s still much too early to tell if that’s what it’ll take in 2028. But if the Newsom way is looking like the surest path to a post-Trump future, I’m happy to head in that direction.
S.O.T.U. Postscript
Kenny Holston/The New York Times Most of the people I know declined to watch Trump’s State of the Union remarks. They’re not living in denial. They’re preserving their sanity for better days.
No such luck for me. I watched all one hour and 47 minutes, and I shared a few of my reactions in the most recent installment of The Conversation, in which my Times Opinion colleague Bret Stephens and I discuss the events of the day.
But here are a few more thoughts:
- I was mesmerized by the overwrought expressions of worship on the faces of Vice President JD Vance and such members of Trump’s cabinet as Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and Kristi Noem, the homeland security menace. They gazed at Trump like angels beaming at the Christ child in some old Italian painting.
- The House speaker, Mike Johnson, wore the creepiest, most beatific expression of all. In a funny take on it in The Atlantic, Alexandra Petri imagined his emotions: “He loved living in a country where he had the freedom to decide for himself how to respond to the president’s words — whether to stand and clap or merely sit and nod, with a little, delighted smile, as though admiring a sandwich that had exactly the right amount of mayonnaise.”
- I couldn’t help cringing a little over the manner in which Americans who’ve shown great heroism or suffered great hardship are turned into political props, and while Trump is hardly the first president to do that, he of course did it to particular excess. These people were being honored, yes, but they were also being used. And on some of their faces, I detected an awareness of that.
- I agreed wholeheartedly with a few of Trump’s comments. “What a difference a president makes.” Truest words he has ever spoken. “Nobody can believe what they’re watching.” I nodded so hard I’m pretty sure I fractured one of my cervical vertebrae.
