Gavin Newsom Has Fulfilled The Bad Faith Prophecy

Way back in October 2023, when Democrats’ plan for beating back fascism was to simply win every presidential election for the next one hundred years, I wrote about an imaginary presidential candidate who would leverage bad-faith politics the way Republicans have, with such grating success. 

This bad-faith Democrat, I wrote, “would look exactly like a fascist: He would wear expensive, tailored suits, he would be fit, he would wear an American flag tie and an obnoxiously large American flag pin, his hair would be styled immaculately, and his gleaming gold watch would be all you could see. This candidate would have a million watt smile and the heartlessness of a killer.”

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This bad-faith president “would deploy this carefully crafted artifice to beat back the rising tide of fascism in the United States and push for the necessary and radical changes to our failing institutions.” This person would pretend to care about shit they did not actually care about to score political points and put his opponents on the defensive. They would wholly reject the idea that voters can be won over with the proper mix of charts and graphs and facts and figures. They would understand on a cellular level that none of that shit matters in an age of unreality in which you and I can live our entire lives by a choose-your-own-adventure logic. In the 2020s, nothing is real if we don’t want it to be real. This person would get that.

Of course it was always going to be Gavin Newsom. That certain crazy look in his eye, the slicked-back hair, the sinister smile, the ambition for ambition’s sake – it was always there, governing California, waiting for his turn to expose the country to his uncontainable ego. Newsom, for better or worse, is the bad-faith president promised to us. Newsom fits my bad-faith presidential description perfectly: He looks “exactly like an asshole.”

A Bad-Faith Presidential Candidate To Save Us All

I can see it so clearly in my mind’s eye: A Democratic presidential candidate adorned in all the trappings of 21st century jingoism, using the no-holds-barred language of conservatives, bulldozing his way through Republicans and into the hearts and minds of normie voters who love this shit. This presidential

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

I fully understand Newsom would be a problematic figurehead of the Democratic Party in this age of ascendant fascism. He’s the American left’s Public Enemy No. 1 because of his baffling dalliances with fascist influencers and podcasters who make a sport out of persecuting trans people and immigrants. Newsom doesn’t seem to have any hardened principles beyond acquiring power and wielding that power to destroy his opponents, namely Republicans. He’ll do what he believes he has to do to gain more power and further torment his enemies. It's a game to him. If that means bandying about banning trans athletes from competition, so be it. If it means putting on his work jeans and work gloves and clearing out unhoused people’s encampments – throwing out their only earthy belongings – so be it. Such is the price of power, in Newsom’s mind at least. 

It’s Newsom’s willingness to sacrifice the most marginalized groups that will alienate huge swaths of the American left. He will prove intolerable to anyone who values justice. Whether it will matter to normies is another question entirely. Normies, I think, will vote for whomever their social media timelines tell them to vote for. Newsom’s Hollywood smile and Gigachad jawline flashing across the timeline is going to look awfully good to those normies, whatever their views on transgender athletes or the unhoused. 

While we’re a long way from crowning the next Democrat who will try to wrestle the White House away from Donald Trump, I’ve made it abundantly clear over the past ninety days that I am fully Pritzkerpilled. The Illinois governor, I think, presents a far more humane and just path out of our fascist horror show than the one proposed by Newsom. While Newsom jokes with fascists like Charlie Kirk about trans people competing in sports, Pritzker opens up a help line for LGBTQ folks who need support and have been abandoned by federal agencies once dedicated to providing that support. While the fabulously wealthy Newsom marches into homeless encampments and wreaks havoc on those who have nothing, the fabulously wealthy Pritzker proposes an extra $50 million in state funding to address homelessness in Illinois. “Homelessness,” Pritzker said, “is not an issue of personal failure, but of historical discrimination and structural barriers that drive inequality.”

Let me be clear: I am a Pritzker guy. 

Newsom’s strategic appeal is not lost on me though. He has fully embraced the kind of bad-faith politics and aesthetic I wrote about a couple years ago. I wrote about it because I think that approach can win in today’s poisoned media and informational environment – it might be the only way to win. Newsom has spent the better part of two months mocking Trump with the sort of insane social media posts that have somehow become normalized by an obedient press that now fears the mad king and his mad vengeance. 

Again and again, Newsom – or whoever controls his social accounts – has antagonized the president with the sort of lunatic pronouncements that pass for presidential decrees in the 21st century. You’ve seen them: They’re crazy and at times they’re vicious and they are unlike anything else Democrats are doing to break the fascist spell that hangs over our poor, brain-poisoned, beaten-down country.

When reporters have asked Newsom why he’s doing this – why he’s refusing to abide by normie political decorum – he has said he’s simply holding up a mirror to the madness that has taken hold of the United States government. His all-caps, sophomoric, sociopathic social media posts are an attempt to force the country to see that to which it has become numb. That includes a compliant mainstream media apparatus whose primary goal is to stay on the right side of the king, media that only cares about the dopamine spigot remaining all the way on. 

Someone on Bluesky – a Californian far more familiar with Newsom than me, a simple Marylander – explained the governor this way: He loves himself and he loves hunting Republicans. You see the former in the way Newsom presents himself, and you see the latter in the way he has taken such childlike glee in gerrymandering the fuck out of California's electoral maps to create at least five more House seats for Democrats in 2026. Republicans have cried about the unfairness of such a scheme and Newsom has responded with a big smile and a fuck you. As an elder millennial who for decades has so desperately wanted elected Democrats to be mean to Republicans, it's a nice little twist to see a Democrat take such immense pleasure in tormenting his opponents. Forget Newsom's (many) shortcomings for a moment: This is good. This is what we need.

I’m not going to dissect Newsom’s every Trump-like post. Instead I want to spend (too much) time analyzing one particularly egregious bad-faith attack in Newsom’s social media campaign against our sick and weak mad king, whose recent disappearance does not seem to interest the media whatsoever. 

Newsom during a recent gubernatorial address unleashed a torrent of bad faith against Republicans who have cheered on the Confederacy's hostile takeover of Washington, D.C. after one of Elon Musk's little DOGE boy got his nose bloodied on the streets of Washington. Curious, Newsom said, that Republican governors have dispatched National Guard troops to D.C. while their own states are plagued by crime and violence. Newsom pointed to Louisiana, a veritable mecca of crushing poverty and unchecked crime and lawlessness, as an example of a state that maybe should be occupied by the federal government if federal officials are actually interested in stopping crime, not putting on overt fascist displays of power in opposition strongholds like Washington and Chicago and LA.

Newsom pointed out that crime rates in Louisiana and Mississippi and other Confederate states are far higher than those in California, and even Los Angeles. Why hasn't the president deployed the military to those states? Newsom of course doesn't really care about crime in southern states ruled by anti-democracy politicians who hate the people they govern. His line of questioning was in no way conceived in good faith. But it prompted a Fox News host to confront House Speaker Mike Johnson (of Louisiana) about his home state's out-of-control crime and why American troops were not descending on his state's cities. Frazzled and agitated, Johnson said Newsom should stick to California matters. For the first time in months, a Republican leader was on his back foot, and we have Newsom's wretchedly bad faith to thank for it.

Only bad faith can expose bad faith, it seems.

Other Democratic governors – Wes Moore comes to mind – criticized the king's occupation of Washington as a waste of resources, as some kind of simple bureaucratic error that made no sense when one examines the falling crime rates in DC. Newsom took a different approach: Invade your own fucking states if you're so worried about crime, but get the fuck out of my state. Moore's approach provides cover for the fascists and normalizes their attempts to subvert American democracy. Newsom's approach exposes them for what they are: Petty wannabe tyrants bent on dominating their feckless opposition. Newsom proposes an interesting dynamic: What if opposition to Republicans was not feckless?

That Newsom cares about nothing but growing his power and using it against anyone who disagrees with him is not a bad approach to politics. I'd prefer that over the gleaming good faith of Pete Buttigieg, whose politics and demeanor strike me as awfully outdated and easily defeated by a radicalized GOP and an outright fascist social media landscape that now works exclusively for the Republican Party. And for those who dismiss Newsom's social media tactics as nothing but posting, I'd argue that posting is the most direct way to gain power in the 21st century. We have been ruled for a decade by a man who gained power by posting on Twitter.

Newsom seems to understand that power can save us. Democrats for so long have been allergic to political power. Listen to the average elected Democrat talk about Republicans caring only about power and you might think power is something to avoid, a pitfall for politicians the world over. Acquiring and using power is the only way to save what's left of American democracy. It would be helpful in the next American Reconstruction too.

Love (good politics) without power, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "is sentimental and anemic." Power at its best, King said, "is love (good politics) implementing the demands of justice."

I'm not one of these Blue MAGA types who have invaded Bluesky – Gen X and boomer Facebook refugees, no doubt – who demand undying loyalty to Newsom three years ahead of the next presidential contest. It's as silly as it is unhelpful. Newsom's almost intentional alienation of the American left is hard (impossible) to stomach. His thirst for power and his willingness to use that power against Republicans separates him from most high-profile Democrats, however, and that can be leveraged for good.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.