A president behaves like a local bully. A governor behaves like a president.
This column is co-published with Zócalo Public Square. Photo credit: CC BY-SA 2.0
Meet the real president of the United States.
His name is Gavin Christopher Newsom. He is the chief executive of America’s richest and most populous state, having been elected by more people than any other governor.
And in this peculiar moment, that makes him the real president, by default.
Sure, there’s a guy living in the White House who some people call president. But real presidents swear an oath to execute the laws and to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. Donald Trump violates the laws and the Constitution so frequently that he has effectively abandoned the post to which he has elected.
And Newsom has effectively assumed the presidency—which explains much of the confusion about the governor’s recent actions. One common complaint is that Newsom—as he travels to make policy agreements with other states and countries, converses with right-wing figures, or takes less-than-progressive positions—is distracted by issues far beyond California. Another dig is that he is pursuing future presidential ambitions.
But those gripes miss what’s really going on. Newsom is acting like the president, not a governor, because, well, the country needs someone to act like a president.
One area of focus for Newsom is preserving American governing capacity, even as Trump and his allies dismantle vital U.S. government agencies. The most recent example is Newsom’s announcement that he is co-chairing (with Illinois’ governor, Cleveland’s mayor, and a former EPA administrator) a coalition called America Is All In, which will continue pursuing environmental and climate policies across the country.
Newsom is also taking a presidential role in the ongoing response to the L.A. fires. In the aftermath of blazes, Trump has ceaselessly played politics, behaving like a petty local political boss, or a deranged California governor. He is attacking federal emergency response, trying to intervene in state policy matters, and tying emergency assistance to unrelated partisan demands, like California adopting a voter identification system.
Newsom, in response, is not taking the bait. Instead he is rising above Trump small-time tactics like a real president, by touting federal assistance to the state and defending and praising the federal agencies that Trump vilifies. [SR1]
In foreign affairs, Newsom trumps the impostor in the White House. While Trump trashes longstanding American allies and junks alliances, President Newsom has been building new ones. Amid Trump’s threats to impose tariffs and even use military force against Mexico, Newsom struck a deal with the governor of the Mexican state of Sonora on climate and economics. America’s real president also made a similar, even larger environment-and-economy agreement with a consortium of 21 Brazilian states.
Such deals come on top of Newsom-signed memorandums of cooperation with Canada, New Zealand, and Japan; memorandums of understanding with China (and multiple provinces and the municipalities of Beijing and Shanghai), Australia, and the Netherlands; an international partnership with South Korea’s powerful Gyeonggi Province; and climate partnerships with Sweden and Norway.
At this point, California probably has more real allies than the United States.
Of course, Newsom’s unannounced shift from governor to president isn’t actually much of a step up. Long before Trump went into politics, the California governorship had grown so powerful and high-profile that it had come to resemble a second American presidency. Our state, the world’s fifth largest economy, is now widely seen as a second, alternative American republic.
Let me say here that Newsom would not be my first pick as the de facto U.S. president in this time of crisis. (I’d rather call Jerry Brown or—damn the natural-born citizen clause—Arnold Schwarzenegger or Angela Merkel out of retirement.) And, because I’m not sure the broken U.S. Constitutional system is worth rescuing, I often wish that the governor was fighting the U.S. government full-time and seeking to save California by establishing it as an independent country—a prospect more than 60 percent of Californians support.
But Newsom has instead chosen to stick up for the American system—like a president would. Indeed, when he does take shots at Trump these days, he’s often defending the Constitution in the process. After Trump and Musk blew up the U.S. Department of Education, Newsom issued a statement defending the constitutional system: “This overreach needs to be rejected immediately by a co-equal branch of government. Or was Congress eliminated by this executive order, too?”
And when California won a recent legal appeal in federal court, preserving the state’s ban on large-capacity magazines for guns, Newsom framed it as a victory for the American tradition of rule of law, which Trump does not respect. “When the executive branch disagrees with a court ruling,” Newsom said in a statement, “the answer isn’t to ignore it—it’s to appeal to a higher court. We did that. We won. That’s how law and order works.”
Newsom’s new podcast, with its declared pluralistic mission—“tackling tough questions, engaging with people who don’t always agree with me, debating without demeaning”—is of a piece with his defend-the-system presidency.
Members of his own party have criticized Newsom, with good reason, for failing to challenge the falsehoods and hatreds of the far-right figures who appear as guests. And the podcast is bad politics for a California Democrat (Newsom’s rhetorical surrender to anti-trans ideology was ugly). But the gambit makes more sense if you’re a president trying to find some consensus in a polarized country. On the podcast, he isn’t really interviewing anyone—he is presiding, since even MAGA strategists like Steve Bannon are President Newsom’s constituents too.
Intriguingly, many Trump acolytes see a real threat in Newsom’s podcast, and thus his unofficial presidency. Bannon called Newsom formidable, and Megyn Kelly, the right-wing journalist, called for MAGA figures to stay off the podcast.
“I don’t like to see it,” Kelly said. “The better he will get, the better he’ll do, the more he’ll understand how to appeal to people who are more right-wing or independently minded but on the right.”
In other words, a real president, seeking to represent the whole country, is a powerful threat to the relentlessly divisive occupier of the White House
Other MAGA types understand this. That’s why Trump fan-girl Marie Alvarado-Gil, a state senator who was elected as a Democrat in 2022 but switched parties last year, is engaged in an angry public feud with her state Senate colleague Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat. Alvarado-Gil is angry that Wiener does not call Trump the president, but rather just calls him by his name.
C’mon, Marie, Scott is just nodding to reality—and the real president. We Californians should follow suit. So let me be the first to say, Good luck, President Newsom! Hail to the (Real) Chief!
