Gavin Newsom has been mentally redecorating the Oval Office for years, but the biggest obstacle to his 2028 presidential ambitions isn’t President Donald Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis, Vice President JD Vance, or any Republican. It’s Gavin Newsom.
He’s spent his career selling California as America’s progressive utopia: a model for the rest of the country to follow. But the reality tells a very different story. Far from being a promised land, California under Newsom has become a national warning label: sky-high costs, crumbling infrastructure, lawless cities, and bureaucratic disasters that turn tragedy into permanent exile for working families.
For example, look at what’s happening with the rebuilding efforts from the Pacific Palisades fire.
The fire itself was bad, but the recovery exposed just how broken California governance has become under Newsom. Displaced families were promised quick relief, but instead were buried in sky-high permitting fees, green-energy mandates, and endless red tape. Months later, little to no rebuilding has occurred. Of nearly 900 permit applications in the Eaton Fire area, only 44 have been approved across all of L.A. County. Many families have given up and left the state entirely.
This failure will hang over Newsom like a storm cloud, just as his disastrous high-speed rail project now stands as one of the most costly and humiliating boondoggles in California history. Touted as a sleek bullet train connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles in under three hours, the project spiraled from a $33 billion promise into a $130 billion money pit before a single mile of track between the two cities was even laid.
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The courts just nuked another one of Newsom’s pet projects, his so-called “common sense” gun control law. The ink was barely dry on Newsom’s latest round of anti-Second Amendment bragging before a federal appeals panel declared, in blunt terms, that his ammunition background check law trampled the Constitution.
However, don’t expect Newsom to engage in any soul-searching. He called the ruling a “slap in the face to the progress California has made in recent years to keep its communities safer from gun violence.”
When yet another of Gavin Newsom’s signature laws gets struck down in court, Americans ought to ask: how many times can a man trip over his own ambition before admitting he’s not ready for the big leagues?
Newsom has spent years cultivating his national image, portraying himself as the anti-Trump tough guy, the pandemic enforcer, and the progressive visionary. But every carefully staged moment of blue-state bravado keeps running into the same wall: failed policy and basic constitutional limits. Newsom is his own worst enemy when it comes to those Oval Office fantasies.
For all his media swagger and DNC-approved slogans, Newsom has left California as a cautionary tale, not a model. His “proof of concept” has become a national warning: skyrocketing homelessness, fleeing families, collapsing infrastructure, and incompetent leadership.
Newsom may think he’s bound for the White House, but more and more Americans are asking a different question: If this is his idea of leadership, why would anyone want the whole country to look like California?
