The Democrats are getting into the entertainment business. During the campaign, they watched Donald Trump bypass the mainstream media by riffing for three hours in the studios of podcast kings like Lex Fridman, Theo Von and Joe Rogan. The thinking goes that young voters listened enraptured, and then bolted to the polls.
So now the party is on a tortured search for that political elixir called “authenticity”. The theory is that voters see photo ops and stage-managed speeches as scripted and artificial, whereas ad-libbing on podcasts about who killed JFK, or the merits of the North Korean shoreline for building beach villas, reveals the man behind the candidate.
Enter Gavin Newsom, the suave, silver-haired and effortlessly inauthentic Californian governor. Newsom has launched a podcast where he interviews bigwig Republicans such as Maga guru Steve Bannon and radio host Michael Savage. The idea is to talk to the enemy, “debate without demeaning” and – as Newsom’s plaintive requests for advice each episode show – ape the Republicans’ riotous success in November. You soon realise it would have been best if these conversations had taken place in private.
Newsom’s first guest is Charlie Kirk, the fluent Republican operative famous for debating college students on campus. Kirk is a political maestro, whose TikToks and campus events are credited with boosting youth support for Donald Trump. Impressive stuff, and something Newsom, as a fellow political operative, appreciates. Or, in Newsom’s words, Kirk is “making a damn dent”.
Don’t be taken in by the promise that this show will contain debate. Newsom melts into a free-loving chum once his guests get into their monologues. When Kirk explains why the Democrats’ support for trans women in women’s sport repels voters, Newsom reveals that, actually, he does think that that policy is stupid. At one point, Kirk tries to get Newsom to give Trump “credit” for fighting through his court battles, to which Newsom replies “100 per cent”. Here are the governor’s catchphrases: “this is very illuminating to me”; “love it”; “totally get it”; “nah, I appreciate that”. When Kirk observes the Democrats have become secluded snobs who look down on ordinary voters, Newsom replies “amen”.
Newsom is so keen to agree with his Republican mentors that he even lies about having used the word “Latinx”. “Not one person ever in my office has ever used the word Latinx,” he told Kirk. It’s a brave thing to broadcast to thousands of listeners when Newsom has used the term at least five times. In a later episode, you can listen to an hour of Bannon railing against the 2008 crash and the injustice of stock buybacks as Newsom sits back, bamboozled, interrupting only to agree that “agency” is vital in politics. “I’ve never liked this cancel culture,” Newsom affirms meekly.
With little actual disagreement, the listener is left with four possible conclusions – all of which point to the problems facing a party trying to reckon with the harsh fact of Trump. The first is that Newsom has always opposed the positions of the Democratic Party and refused to mention that before now. The second is that, since the election, he has undergone a Damascene conversion to a Californian twist on Maga’s anti-woke nationalism. The third is that he is making the cynical judgement that the party must drop its excessive progressivism to win elections. The fourth explanation is that he had never thought deeply about these policy questions on an intellectual level, and so, when presented with the arguments from the other side, is powerless to respond. None of these interpretations flatter the governor ahead of his much-rumoured presidential bid in 2028.
The cracks in the Democratic Party go much deeper than their late entry into the podcast industry. Most post-election analysis willingly descends into a seminar on “comms strategy”. Kirk tells Newsom that the only way to earn the respect of “Forgotten America” is to “intellectually joust with no script” on long-form podcasts. But Newsom’s recent guests – Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential pick Tim Walz and liberal icon Ezra Klein – suggest the governor has lost the stomach to listen to right-wing sermons at his expense. At some point he is going to have to answer the question: what’s the point in talking for three hours if you have nothing to say?
Content from our partners
