Dana Bash did something that honestly surprised me in her recent interview with Gavin Newsom. She made him admit what he’s spent years dancing around: the fact that he was born into privilege and benefited from powerful connections.
CNN’s usually friendly setting turned into an uncomfortable mirror for the California governor, who is carefully crafting a certain image of himself as he lays the groundwork for a 2028 presidential campaign. Believe it or not, it was like watching Bash debunk the mythology that Newsom has created about himself, and he seemed to realize it was all blowing up in his face.
It all started when Bash read aloud from Newsom’s book: “My deeper entry into the Getty world would rob me of my own hard-earned story, a theft that would become one of the very reasons for writing this book.”
“Can you explain that?” she asked.
Newsom tried to thread the needle, as he always does, by pretending he was a humble guy who didn’t get a leg up from the rich and well-connected. “The press wrote it as if it was the Getty business," he lamented. "And so much of that identity that was attached to that relationship, even though he put in as much money as all the other investors.” He added, “I'm not saying that to impress you, but to impress upon you how entrepreneurialism has defined my life. But it was also defined in the relationship to the Getty family.”
But Bash wasn’t buying the smoke. “Can it be both?” she asked. “You have the hard work and grind, and you had doors open.”
There it was: a simple, pointed question that sliced through the narrative armor.
“Yes,” Newsom conceded before immediately trying to whitewash what he just said. “Oh, no, and that’s —” he stumbled.
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But Bash doubled down. “I mean, it’s not just the Gettys. Your grandfather and your father were both very connected in San Francisco.”
At that point, the governor couldn’t dodge it. “I am — I’m here because of all of them and their shoulders, and 100%,” he finally admitted. There was a flicker of honesty in that acknowledgment, one that probably slipped past his media handlers. He added, “All those doors, all the privileges of those relationships — remarkable gifts. And they’re deeply mined and discussed there. And then, again, with a work ethic from my mom. And so it was both and.”
Translation: Yes, privilege, but please also note that my mom worked hard.
Bash pressed the contrast further. “[Your family vacations] weren’t just adventures,” she said, describing Newsom’s rarefied childhood experiences. “You went on safaris. You took pictures from helicopters.”
“Yes, polar bears.”
“And you were partying with Jack Nicholson,” Bash reminded him.
“Yes, yes,” he said again, with a sheepish smile. “That’s — I mean, we described that in there. It was extraordinary.”
By then, the mask had fully slipped.
CNN’s Dana Bash continues to surprise everyone.
— Overton (@overton_news) February 23, 2026
She just forced Gavin Newsom to admit a hard truth about his privileged upbringing — something he was clearly hoping to gloss over as he tried to whitewash his past for 2028.
You can see the pain on his face the moment he realized… pic.twitter.com/5IzIKWSQN0
Newsom’s life looked a lot less like the bootstrap saga he pretends it to be and a lot more like the story of a man who never had to knock on a closed door; they were opened for him. And Bash called him out.
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