President Gavin Newsom!

Democrats need their own Donald Trump. He's right here in California.

Column: SFGATE politics reporter Alec Regimbal argues that Democrats can beat Republicans at their own game by unleashing Gavin Newsom

By Alec Regimbal

If you’ve spent any time online over the past four days, you’ve probably seen internet users thirsting over Gavin Newsom. But if you chose to crawl into a hole after Tuesday’s election, I will sum up the posts for you: Gavin Newsom is an evil sociopath and he’s hot and he hates Republicans so he must run for president.

The reason for this unabashed yearning is, of course, that Donald Trump is the president-elect. Again. How catastrophic his second term will be is still unclear. What is clear, though, is that Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party suffered a remarkable ass-kicking on Election Day.

Harris lost all seven swing states, and is on track to lose the popular vote. Republicans took the presidency and the Senate and are poised to keep the House. Harris actually won fewer electoral college votes than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. It was an exceptionally thorough drubbing.

So, it seems, those social media users are onto something. Newsom, like Trump, is pugilistic. Newsom, like Trump, is petty. Newsom, like Trump, is vain. Newsom, like Trump, really wants to live in the White House.

The presidential rumors have been swirling around Newsom for decades, but they were supercharged in 2022 after a fiery speech in which he called out the rest of the Democratic Party for not being more proactive in taking the fight to Republicans. Since then, he’s shown that his now-famous call to action wasn’t just talk.

He started a political action committee dedicated to getting Democrats elected in deep-red areas and even toured many of those places to promote it. He’s argued with pundits on Fox News, apparently just for the lols, and last year even participated in a televised debate with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who was running for the Republican nomination for president at the time.

Watch clips from that debate. Newsom is almost Trumpian in his performance. He’s confident, boisterous and doesn’t hesitate to get personal in his digs at DeSantis. Newsom made the Florida governor look like a fool, and he wasn’t even running for anything at the time. He did it simply because he wanted the fight. That bloodlust was highlighted in one post from over the weekend: “As a Californian, Newsom is an evil psychopathic demon who feeds on the blood of Republicans. I despise everything about him and cannot wait for the day I get to vote for him as president.”

Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, became famous for calling Republicans weird little freaks over the summer. Republicans were peeing their pants when Democrats started calling them weird, because it was a stunningly effective message, because they ARE weird. It is objectively weird to wonder what genitals a high school athlete has. It is objectively weird to insist a female child should carry her rapist’s baby to term.

While that message was inexplicably and quickly abandoned by the Harriz-Walz campaign, it showed that eschewing decorum in favor of aggression can have a real impact. Newsom absolutely loves that s—t, having used adjectives like “delusional” and “poisonous” to describe right-wing ideology in his State of the State address earlier this year.

Notably, Newsom’s attention-seeking bulldog approach to certain issues hasn’t been broadly disqualifying, which is unusual from the left-wing purity test crowd. Many of the fawning posts on X over the past few days refer to Newsom as a psychopath or a sociopath, referencing in particular his calls for California cities to be more forceful in clearing out homeless encampments. Newsom himself helped clear an encampment in Los Angeles County earlier this year.

This is genuinely unhinged behavior, especially for a clean-shaven Californian who once posed for appallingly intimate photos with his then-wife in the mansion of a Getty Oil heir. Yet here he is now, one affair and zombified debate and unmasked French Laundry dinner later, donning workman’s gloves and a flirty black V-neck to pick up trash from under a freeway overpass.

As I watched the election results come in Tuesday, I thought of a social media post made in 2018 by @Arr on what was formerly Twitter: “The last decade has been the Democrats clinging onto the rulebook going ‘but a dog can’t play basketball!’ while a dog f—king dunks on us over and over.”

I think about that post often, because @Arr is right. If there’s one thing I admire about Republicans, it’s that they know how to win. They got Trump, a boorish former reality TV star who entered politics at age 69, elected twice over more qualified candidates. They hijacked a U.S. Supreme Court seat in 2016. Then they did it again in 2020 by completely reversing all the faux-righteous reasoning they offered in 2016.

Democrats, meanwhile, are obsessed with decorum. It’s a debilitating weakness.

There is nothing that Trump could do that would lead his supporters to abandon him. I truly do believe he could, as he once said, “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not “lose any voters.” Democrats need someone to match that energy, and it just so happens that one image in particular of Newsom has been circulating in the last few days, in which he is wearing a crisp blue suit and clutching an AR-15 rifle as he directly addresses “members of the United States Supreme Court.” It was ripped from a 2022 video that accompanied his signing of two bills to ban ghost guns in California, and it is the purest distillation of Newsom’s unique blend of debonair and deranged.

With Trump’s latest victory, it’s time for Democrats to throw out the playbook of the past decade. “When they go low, we go high!” has proved ineffective. Democrats need a big man to stand at the base of the hoop and stuff the dog that keeps dunking on them. They need Gavin Newsom.