Newspaper Reader on Remnick chiding of Newsom, via Nathan Heller’s reportage!

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Feb 01, 2026

David Remnick
Editor, The New Yorker

Is Gavin Newsom running for President? “I’m not thinking about running, but it’s a path that I could see unfold,” he has said, offering a new twist on the tradition of pre-announcement coyness. Many political kibitzers consider Newsom to be the front-runner for the Democratic nomination—“an odd claim,” the New Yorker staff writer Nathan Heller points out in this week’s issue, “about a race in which nobody is yet running.”

Newsom, who leads the nation’s most populous and powerful state, continues to position himself in direct opposition to Donald Trump. To do so, he sometimes seems to borrow from Trump’s noisy tactics of self-presentation. Newsom is brash, confrontational, unrelenting. He gleefully baits the President on social media, weaponizing Trump’s own tactics against him. He recently helped lead California to pass Proposition 50, a sort of tit-for-tat legislative response to gerrymandering in Texas, a moment that galvanized Democrats nationally (and, conveniently, allowed Newsom to flex his coalition-building skills). His hope is to extend his appeal well beyond states as reliably blue as California. As the veteran Democratic Party operative James Carville told Heller, “Part of his selling will have to be, I can play in the middle of the country—I can play fresh water and I can play salt water.”

In this Profile, Heller provides a definitive portrait of Gavin Newsom. He explores Newsom’s upbringing (perhaps less humble than Newsom cares to admit) in the Bay Area and his dramatic rise in California politics. Heller charts how Newsom’s early battles with dyslexia still influence his working style today. (The Governor memorizes speeches rather than reading them, because he sees lines on a teleprompter “as a single image, like a Chinese character.”) His report is filled with fascinating details about Newsom’s character, his thinking, and his flaws. We learn a great deal about how he operates. The Governor reads a compendium of right-wing blogs every morning. He has nine thousand twenty-two contacts in his phone, “and is in touch with a startling number of them,” Heller writes. (“It’s like his focus group,” one former adviser said.) Newsom does not suffer from blandness. Reported over many months, Heller’s piece makes it plain that Newsom’s life and career is filled with personal drama, political confrontation, and raw ambition. He can, “at times,” Heller notes, “seem more like the Tom Cruise of politics, more successful than beloved.” But he is studying the recent past with care to make sure he optimizes his chances in 2028. As Heller writes, Newsom “dutifully records every explanation he hears for the Democrats’ losses in 2024 on a list that now runs to twenty-seven pages.”

Heller, who had deep access to Newsom and the people in his personal and political worlds, pulls off a difficult feat: he offers a fresh and useful perspective on a politician who has been around for a long time. At a moment when the nation’s focus is, rightfully, on the chaos sown by the current Administration, it’s a look at what might come next. Depending, of course, on whom you ask. Some in California are a little less coy about Newsom’s future. Willie Brown, a former mayor of San Francisco said, matter-of-factly, of Newsom’s Presidential aspirations, “I think he’s had that in mind from Day One.”

Newsom, for his part, likes to play it cool. “He tells people that, if his political career ended tomorrow, he would return to life in business, and what a mercy that would be,” Heller writes. “But the feint convinces almost no one.”

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The New Democrats of a retooled and medatious Reaganism, whose betrayel of FDR & Ferdinand Pecora of Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933, is about the utter bankruptcy of a Political Party, that has become the toxic and self-aggrandizing twin of The Republicans!

Editor: In the face of Trump and Trumpism, in its various expressions of internal political moral/civic/intitutional collapse: what David Remnick offers what is not quite an introduction, that he manages to construct a kind of political melodrama, that he mines from Nathan Heller’s reportage!

Newspaper Reader.