Newsom relishes in far-right venom as he races to bring down Trump

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina — Gavin Newsom didn’t dream about becoming the left’s surrogate-in-chief. But he’s relishing his status as enemy No. 1 to the far-right.

From presidential debates in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and his own undercard in Alpharetta, Georgia, Newsom spun and spun and spun for the Democratic ticket, and, occasionally, for himself. Months after debating Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Fox News — a prime-time broadcast blessed by President Joe Biden’s White House — Newsom traveled through the South to stump for Biden, and later conducted a tour of Blue Wall states.

There was Newsom, on June 27, moments after Biden’s horrendous debate, sitting for a battery of cable news interviews that were part-interrogation, part therapy session. For the latter, he put the host in the chair, rather than the other way around.

“You may recall,” the California governor told a backyard canvassing event Thursday in Charlotte, “I was the chief surrogate coming on and trying to calm down Rachel Maddow and saying, ‘It's going to be OK.’” The crowd laughed. Enough time had passed to hit pause on the spin. “That was a tough night.”

Newsom in his next breath offered that he was proud to have Biden’s back until the end, that he continues to make the case that there has not been a president in his lifetime that’s been more transformative, and that Vice President Kamala Harris can lay claim to much of that record. Newsom was back campaigning for her this week.

“I couldn't be more proud of my old friend, Kamala Harris,” Newsom said. “And I say that not in the political [sense]. I know you hear politicians say, ‘my old friend,’ and you're shivving them in the back. Kamala Harris and I knew each other five or six years before we were both in politics, [we] used to go on vacation together, dinner together and had mutual friend groups.”

There are dozens of other Democrats, of course, competing for who’s next. But no others have been so familiar with each other for so long, sharing a political network and chugging uphill on parallel tracks. And certainly no others have a contender on the doorstep of the presidency, raising a politically existential question for the other: What’s next?

On Friday, Newsom was in nearby Cabarrus County, telling a roomful of seniors why he felt far more useful there than in his home state, where the only question was whether Harris would eclipse former President Donald Trump by five million or six million votes.

“I know everybody's focused on Wisconsin, focused on Pennsylvania, Michigan,” he said. “You pull it off here, it's over. And when I say here, I mean, literally, here.”

The exposure over the presidential cycle has undeniably benefited Newsom. But there is still something deeply humbling about life as a surrogate. Back home, he presides over the world’s fifth-largest economy. He’s bringing massive oil companies to heel and recently vetoed sweeping regulations on artificial intelligence that would have been a model not just for California or the United States, but the world. Yet Thursday, there was Newsom, wandering around the quad at University of North Carolina, Charlotte, mingling with a handful of students and posing for selfies while exchanging small talk about NASCAR and Trump and his “old friend” Kamala Harris.

Didn’t she school Fox News anchor Bret Baier in their interview this week, Newsom asked an attendee, tapping a hand on their shoulder? Didn’t she?

Trump “didn't have the courage to show up on '60 Minutes,'” he said at a stop with Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles and the hometown U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan. “You think [Trump] is ever going to get interviewed by Rachel Maddow? He is scared to death.”

It was hardly a sure bet that so much of Newsom’s year would be occupied with the presidential race. Before he joined the starting five on Team Biden, Newsom elicited eyerolls from inside the administration. When he took an unmistakable shot at Democratic leaders in Washington for being too slow to seize on the impact of the Supreme Court eliminating abortion rights, one Biden aide likened Newsom’s Paul Revere routine to a baseball fan screaming from the bleachers. Over the next year, he greatly improved his standing with the White House, in part by assuring top advisers that he had no interest in challenging the president in 2024.

Newsom’s campaign stops had always brought at least a few questions about his White House ambitions — if not from the news media, certainly from voters, part of the wink-and-nod trade-off between surrogate and principal that everyone seems to understand. Biden’s team occasionally felt like Newsom fell too easily in love with his own script rather than dutifully reading from theirs. He delivered where it mattered most. Newsom repeatedly deferred to Biden, but when voters would press Newsom harder about why he wasn’t running, contending something could happen to Biden given his age, Newsom would say Harris was best positioned to assume the mantle.

Still, he didn’t expect anything to happen to Biden. Even after the June debate, Newsom insisted the president’s campaign was taking necessary steps to course correct.

Surrogates — the good ones, at least — never abandon their patron. And Newsom, by several accounts inside the campaign, was the standout Biden surrogate: decades younger, telegenic, a natural pugilist and a politician able to carry the White House’s message like few others.

He would rattle off a dizzying number of statistics around jobs and manufacturing and held up the Biden administration’s social spending plan, Build Back Better, along with infrastructure and microchips and even the long-elusive deal on guns.

He savaged Trump as the leader of a Republican rights regression that already claimed abortion and was putting in peril other rights like gay and interracial marriage and even contraception.

Newsom delivered the delegates to ceremonially put Harris over the top for the Democratic nomination. But he took a licking from California pundits for his low-profile in Chicago. It didn’t help that he joked about Harris winning the nomination in a “very open process.”

The transition from full-throated Biden stan to Harris surrogate was slow. He appeared at, and later hosted fundraisers, for Harris’ ticket alongside Tim Walz and Nancy Pelosi.

Meanwhile, in Sacramento, Newsom rallied his staff, eager to ward off even the notion of creeping lame-duck status by filling their notebooks with ideas and new initiatives. On Monday, he signed legislation aimed at reining in soaring gas prices after calling lawmakers back for a special session. Newsom has two years left as governor.

Then he got back on the road for Harris, with the trip this week to North Carolina and a quick hop aboard a bus with other governors in Michigan serving as a bookend to his year-opener in South Carolina.

He said it’s strange being so familiar with both Harris and Trump, nodding to the sibling rivalry (he hates that term, by the way). Newsom officially became mayor of San Francisco a mere minutes before she took the oath of office for district attorney. “That was pretty much the last time that I did anything before Kamala Harris,” he said.

And he touched on how a victory by either she or Trump would impact him and his state.

“You have an old friend and ally in the White House that you have a next-level relationship — not just with her — but with a lot of people around her and likely with the vast majority of people she brings into the administration,” Newsom said of Harris. “I've got a lot I want to finish up” on as governor before he’s termed out in 2026.

Newsom is convinced a victorious Trump would commence with a “vengeance” tour as soon as his transition. He spoke at length about Trump’s current and past promises to withhold federal disaster relief funds and his threats to California on climate to immigration policies.

“He goes to the Economic Club and brings up ‘Newscum,’” he said, referring to Trump’s nickname for him. “There’s a ubiquity with me, because it’s one degree of separation. I’m not just talking about [ex-wife] Kimberly [Guilfoyle], but even in his right-wing universe, talking to Bret Baier, talking to Sean Hannity all the time, talking to these guys, I'm in their head. … Even when I'm not making news, I’m in their news cycles. I’m part of their conversations. I’m in his head in that respect because that's his ecosystem. That's the sludge that he sort of works through. And so I am very mindful of the world radically changing in both ways.”

At a brew pub near Davidson College, the alma mater of NBA great Stephen Curry, and throughout the trip, Newsom pronounced it an existential moment in American history. “And you have the ability to determine fate and future,” he said.

On Wednesday, he made his first visit to the National Archives to see the Declaration of Independence, and attended the memorial of Ethel Kennedy in Washington, sitting behind Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and describing how moved he was by it all.

“Her life was about racial justice, economic justice, social justice. She was a fierce warrior of service and contribution,” said Newsom, who has long revered the Kennedy family. “They talked about words you don't hear about a lot today: empathy, care, compassion, collaboration, the spirit of [Martin Luther] King Jr. was alive talking about this notion [that] we're all bound together by this web of mutuality.”

Newsom sat beside former Secretary of State John Kerry, who himself came within a whisper of the White House. Kerry spoke about the close margin in Ohio, “about the importance of every vote … about what could have been,” Newsom said.

The stakes in November for his own career are different now, too. A Harris victory could sideline him from making a White House run for eight years — if he ever makes one at all. But a Trump win would immediately vault him to the presidency, not of the United States, but certainly of blue America.

The surrogate — now in his second year, and on his second candidate — refused to look beyond the next few weeks.

“I don't even want to think about that,” Newsom said. “This country needs a break from the next election. It’s exhausting.”

Before setting out for one of his final days on the trail in 2024, he bemoaned the billions of dollars being spent on the permanent campaign.

“It's not like we're not playing in that game either, the Democratic faction. But this is a joke,” Newsom said. “This is gross. This is not sustainable.”