Gavin Newsom Is A Piece of Shit

Let us count the ways.

Image: Gage Skidmore, CC

Yesterday I cheered on a Democrat doing good things. So, I’m going to balance that out by kicking a Democrat for sucking in a really impressive and thoroughgoing manner.

Earlier this week, California Governor Gavin Newsom was asked for his views on the case of Kilmar Abrego García, the Maryland man the Trump administration kidnapped and shipped to El Salvador because of a clerical error. Trump is defying a 9-0 Supreme Court decision and refusing to return Abrego García to the US.

Newsom responded with despicable cowardness. He said Abrego García’s kidnapping was a “distraction.”

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“It’s exactly the debate they want,” Newsom insisted. “Because they don’t want this debate on the tariffs. They don’t want to be accountable to markets today.”

Again, it’s hard to overstate how ugly this response is. The Trump administration is kidnapping people without due process and shipping them to slave labor camps in El Salvador. Trump is defying a Supreme Court order; he is also insisting that he has the right to deport US citizens without due process.

Except that kidnapping your own citizenry and sending them abroad isn’t “deportation.” It’s disappearing. Or human trafficking. Or tyranny. Or, you know, all of those things.

Newsom’s logic here is fairly straightforward if you have neither a spine nor guts nor a brain. Trump’s tariffs are wildly unpopular, and his handling of the economy is also polling badly. In contrast, his numbers on immigration remain relatively strong. Deporting undocumented people, the core of Trump’s immigration policy, has fairly high appeal. So, Newsom figures, Democrats should talk about tariffs and leave Abrego García to rot in El Salvador.

The thing is, though, that while immigration in general polls well for Trump, many of his specific policies do not. Deporting immigrants without criminal convictions to El Salvador, for example, has only 26% support; 61% of voters are against it.

Defying the Supreme Court is also unpopular. The Abrego García, is, then, an opportunity to raise people’s awareness of what Trump’s immigration policy means in practice, and quite possibly to erode his advantage on the issue.

More, this is an issue where you have to fight, no matter what the polls say, because this is an issue that could render all polls, and the Democratic party, and US democracy, irrelevant.

Trump is claiming the power to kidnap anyone in the US and disappear them into a foreign prison for life with zero (0) oversight, without due process and without appeal. That means he has the power to disappear Abrego García. It means he has the power to disappear me. He has the power to disappear you. And he has the power to disappear literally any political opponent he feels like.

If he has the power to arrest anyone without any charges or due process, he could arrest Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or J.B. Pritzker, or whoever runs against him in 2028. He could arrest Democratic Senators. By Trump’s logic, no one is immune.

I have mentioned this before, but it’s just worth reiterating because people like Gavin Newsom apparently do not understand it. But if you do not have a democracy, you do not have a democracy. A tyrant with the power to arrest, imprison, disappear, and kill his enemies does not have to worry about polls or elections, because he can just murder his opponents if they get too uppity. Abrego García is not a “distraction.” He’s the whole ball game. If Trump can do what he has done to this man, we have no democracy, and the Democrats are a superfluous joke.

And most Democrats, to their credit, appear to have figured this out. Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador and forced the regime there to let him speak to Abrego García and confirm that he is alive and in good health. New York Congressman Ritchie Torres—a Zionist who often attacks progressives—has introduced a bill essentially requiring the US to cut off diplomatic relations with El Salvador if the country does not return Abrego García. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker denounced the administrations kindapping of Abrego García and said, accurately, “if they get away with it now, they'll do it to anyone.”

So, many Democrats—and not just progressive Democrats!—have figured out that this is a line where we have to fight. For that matter, even conservatives like Bret Stephens at the New York Times have denounced the Trump administration on this issue.

So what is the deal with Gavin Newsom? Why is he such a spineless blob of spineless jello, sitting there and quivering spinelessly?

I am not in Gavin Newsom’s head or heart, obviously (and thankfully.) But I think the key to his spinelessness is probably the usual one—he thinks that Trump won in 2024 because Americans hate immigrants, and so he figures that the best path to power for one, Gavin Newsom, is to hate immigrants—or at least, not to defend them. (Similar logic has led Newsom to host a podcast in which he invites on disgusting fascist assholes and then they pat each other on the back for hating trans people.)

Newsom believes he is being clever and pragmatic. He’s so invested in being clever and pragmatic and so impressed with his own lack of principles that he has apparently missed the part where if Trump ends our democracy, the Democratic nomination in 2028 is not going to be worth very much. It might just be a one way ticket to El Salvador.

In any case, it doesn’t really matter what combination of bigotry, ambition, and dimwittedness has led Newsom to this place of cringing acquiescence in hate and fascism. What matters is that we, as a country and a party, should never let this asshole anywhere near any position of party leadership ever again.

Democrats who aren’t willing to fight for democracy and aren’t willing to extend solidarity to Trump’s victims are useless and worse than useless. This isn’t a matter of left and right; it’s not really even a matter of age (Newsom, 57, is younger than Pritzker, 60.) As I’ve said before, the current important split in the Democratic party is fight/not fight. Newsom, that sluglike motherfucker, is on the wrong fucking side.