California Governor Gavin Newsom’s wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, is getting raked over the coals for comments she made several years ago, suggesting criminals housed in a notorious California prison, which was known for housing violent criminals and death row prisoners, got there by “accident.”

Siebel Newsom’s comments came as she was discussing a tragedy in her younger life at an event in 2016. A few days before her seventh birthday, Siebel Newsom was involved in a fatal golf cart accident that ultimately killed her sister.  

“I had to be very raw when we interviewed the young men who were juvenile offenders at San Quentin. I told them about my own loss, where I lost my older sister a few days before my seventh birthday and I blame myself for her death and I share that because they ultimately were accused of committing these violent crimes and sentenced for life, and I think it shocked them that this blonde lady, who was interviewing them, had a similar story – was perhaps in the wrong place at the wrong time – but wasn’t punished the way they were because clearly it was an accident, but theirs was probably an accident too,” Siebel Newsom said when discussing ways to connect with others. 

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“Anyways, I share that – I guess – I quite enjoy spending time with people and being real and unmasking and showing them that it’s safe to unmask themselves.”

A spokesperson for Governor Newsom’s wife clarified that the remarks in the 2016 interview with the First Partner, were referring to incarcerated individuals for her 2015 documentary “The Mask You Live In.” 

The spokesperson did not provide an on-the-record statement but did point Fox News Digital to a social media post from Gov. Newsom’s press office calling out the media for being “focused on running nonstop hit pieces on California’s First Partner,” while the president is “threatening to obliterate a civilization tonight.” 

On Tuesday, the same day the clip began going viral on social media, President Donald Trump issued an ominous message on his social media platform Truth Social, indicating “a whole civilization will die tonight,” amid his threat of a looming U.S. attack against Iranian bridges and power plants.

“This is the MAGA distraction machine — in full force,” concluded the social media post, which included news segments criticizing Siebel Newsom on Tuesday.

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However, Siebel Newsom’s resurfaced comments still garnered attention on Tuesday from conservative critics who called the California governor’s spouse out for virtue signaling.

In direct response to Siebel Newsom’s claims that San Quentin inmates got in their position by “accident,” Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., shot back sarcastically: “Yeah, like the time that guy accidentally stabbed that dude 27 times.”

“What the…” commented Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice, Harmeet Dhillon, in a social media post responding to the 2016 remarks.

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“She represents everything that is wrong with California,” comedian Adam Carolla added. 

“Newsom’s wife’s latest virtue signal is telling San Quentin lifers that she faced zero consequences when her sister was killed because it was an accident, then telling them their life sentences are probably for ‘accidents’ too,” wrote conservative women’s sports activist Riley Gaines. “Peak elite tone-deafness.”

Amid all the alarming and unhinged comments of the president of the United States in recent days threatening Iran with genocide — remarks beyond even the usual cray-cray blather from Donald Trump — it was a statement from his spokesperson on Tuesday that really put the madness in the White House in perspective.

“Only the President knows where things stand and what he will do,” Karoline Leavitt said.

She issued those words just hours before Trump’s 8 p.m. Tuesday deadline for Iran to either reopen the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping or face Armageddon — that is, war crimes by the United States. The statement from the White House press secretary was as clear a description as Americans could get of governance under Trump these days: A mad king reigns, virtually unchecked.

And as a practical matter, there is nothing under the Constitution, neither impeachment nor removal under the 25th Amendment, that can be done about him. There’s only voters’ opportunity to eject the complicit Republican majorities in the House and Senate in November’s midterm elections, to install a Democratic — and democratic — check on Trump for the remaining two years of his term.

By now we know that, just before Trump’s deadline to Iran warning “a whole civilization will die tonight,” he announced a fragile two-week ceasefire for negotiations. The commander in chief declared victory, natch. But so did Iran. And it had the better of the argument: Iran continued to control and monetize passage through the strait, unlike before Trump’s war began Feb. 28, and already on Wednesday it flexed that power by closing the route in retaliation for Israeli strikes. The ceasefire also lets Iran retain possession of its enriched, nearly bomb-grade uranium, and the nation won Trump’s offer of possible tariff and sanctions relief.

So much for the “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” he demanded in a post a month ago.

I’m writing these words on Wednesday. Who knows where things will stand by the time you’re reading this? “Only the president knows.”

Trump has fluctuated, reversed and contradicted himself repeatedly — even within a single social-media screed or chest-thumping performance for the press — since he ordered war against Iran nearly six weeks ago, without notice to Congress, let alone its authorization. Since Sunday, he’s variously called Iran’s leaders “crazy bastards” and “animals” and taken credit for “Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail.”

Presidential rule by fiat and whim would be wrong in any case under the Constitution’s checks and balances of power, and specifically of war power. But in Trump’s case, America has a president who lately has piled on the evidence that he is mentally unstable, unfit for the office.

And spare us the cheerleaders’ claims on Fox News about how he’s playing multidimensional chess. When even Alex Jones likens Trump to “crazy King Lear” and calls for invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from power — echoing former Trump promoters including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Candace Owens, among others — you know he’s crossed a line by his unilateral war-making and profane threats (on Easter Sunday!) of genocidal apocalypse.

The evidence of Trump’s dangerous instability has been there from his political genesis. In his first term, he warned he’d unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen” against nuclear-armed North Korea then declared that he “fell in love” with dictator Kim Jong-un (without achieving any diminution in Kim’s arsenal). He celebrates the deaths of political enemies and prosecutes those still living. He repeatedly interrupts himself on some policy question to bloviate about his ballroom plans.

He’s ordered armed agents into American neighborhoods on immigration raids, then expressed neither responsibility nor remorse when citizens died and legal residents got deported. The national security leaders of his first term let it be known that they’d prevented him from acting on his worst impulses, but there’s no chance of that from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Retired Gen. Mark Milley, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in 2021 described first-term Trump as being in mental decline and “fascist to the core.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks Trump has gotten better in the intervening five years.

The country “can’t be a therapy session for … a troubled man like this,” Trump’s first-term attorney general, William P. Barr, told CBS in 2023 as Trump campaigned to return to office.

If only the presidency were therapy for Trump. Instead he’s like a power addict in the world’s most powerful job, mainlining its intoxicants, and no one will stop him. Only people with extraordinary egos seek the White House in the first place, but when an actual egomaniac inhabits that warping bubble of butter-uppers, there’s danger. I remain haunted by the words of retired Gen. John F. Kelly, Trump’s first-term Homeland Security secretary and then White House chief of staff, who in 2023 said of Trump’s potential reelection: “God help us.”

Having failed twice to convict and remove Trump in his first term, Democrats have shied from a third attempt, until now. Scores in Congress have called for impeachment or invocation of the 25th Amendment to oust him. There’s some value in sending a message. But Democrats are offering supporters false hope. A Republican-led Congress and a Cabinet of clownish sycophants will not exercise the powers they have, even against a mad king.

The authors of the Constitution, having thrown off a king, debated at length how to guard against a power-crazed president. But they didn’t anticipate political parties that put tribal loyalty over the country. That partisanship has rendered the high bars to a president’s removal — a vote of two-thirds of the Senate for conviction after impeachment, or, under the 25th Amendment, action by the vice president and a Cabinet majority — all but insurmountable.

That leaves the voters, who in special and off-year elections as recently as Tuesday have shown their zeal to punish Trump’s party. We can hope that a new Congress will check him come January.

And we can pray.

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