California
Fun things to do in Southern California that are always free
Living in Southern California can be expensive. No surprise there. But you may be surprised to know how many things you can do for free. Seriously. Always free (except sometimes for parking.)
So why spend a fortune to take the family out for the day? Here’s some cool things you can do without even opening your wallet. And if you know of something I missed, let me know!
ALWAYS FREE
Agua Dulce — Vasquez Rocks: This unique county park is worth the scenic drive toward the Antelope Valley, as it offers rustic walks among some of the most photographed rocks anywhere. This county park has been the scene of many a movie and TV shoot, as the closest “other-worldly” place to replicate for shows such as Star Trek. There are pleasant nature walks, and kids will love climbing on the rocks. Bring lots of water. There’s a small visitor center. Wear sensible shoes and sneakers. Warning: It’s hellishly hot in the summer. 10700 Escondido Canyon Road, Agua Dulce. parks.lacounty.gov/vasquez-rocks-natural-area-and-nature-center/
Costa Mesa — Orange County Museum of Art:. Open Wednesdays-Sundays. This contemporary museum is located on the Segerstrom Center for the Arts campus and was designed by award-winning architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis Studios. The collection includes some 4,500 pieces on rotating exhibit. You will need to print out a free ticket that can be obtained online. 3333 Avenue of the Arts, Costa Mesa. Adjacent paid parking. 714-780-2130 or ocma.art
Irvine — Turtle Rock Nature Center:. Open Mondays-Saturdays. This five-acre nature preserve is a great place for kids to run off steam, or just relax. It offers a paved trail, garden, a walking labyrinth and interpretive center. Location: 1 Sunnyhill Drive, Irvine. 949-724-6738 or cityofirvine.org/parks-facilities/turtle-rock-nature-center
Jurupa Valley — Jurupa Mountains Discovery Center: Open Saturdays and Sundays only. Museum of Discoveries is free. Wander the botanical garden, turtle pond and see the dinosaur statues. Parking $10. 7621 Granite Hill Drive, Jurupa Valley. jmdc.org
La Habra Heights — Powder Canyon Family Hike: This two-mile easy hike in the Puente Hills nature preserve, on packed earth at the Black Walnut trailhead starts out a little steep, but afterward is relatively level and easy for most families. There are some nice trees along the way for shade. Nothing too dramatic to look at, but a pleasant time out of the city. There are also more rigorous hikes available here, along with biking and riding terrain. The parking and entrance are on Fullerton Road in the Puente Hills Preserve. Learn more: Habitatauthority.org
Lake Forest — Heritage Hill Historical Park: Free visit and parking. Visit the 1863 Serrano Adobe, the 1890 El Toro Grammar School and the 1891 Episcopal Mission. Building interiors are open only during the free tours, at 11 a.m. on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. No reservations necessary. Meet at the Serrano Adobe. 25151 Serrano Road, Lake Forest. 949-923-2230 ocparks.com/heritagehill
Long Beach — Rancho Los Cerritos: Open Wednesdays-Sundays. This remaining 4.74 acres of one of the huge ranchos that once covered California includes an historic adobe and allows visitors to imagine themselves as early Californios. The “Ranch of the Little Hills” once was part of a 300,000-acre Spanish land grant settled by Spanish soldier Juan Nieto. It eventually became a 27,000-acre working ranch that included two adobes and facilities for his descendants’ family and 12 children. Online reservations are requested but not mandatory. 4600 Virginia Road, Long Beach. 562-206-2040 or rancholoscerritos.org
Los Angeles — The Broad: Open Tuesdays-Sundays.this modern art museum is always free, but get advance tickets to avoid the long walk-up line. This museum in downtown L.A. features contemporary art from the collection of the late developer Eli Broad. The general collection is always free to view. There’s a parking garage that charges a few bucks, though if you’re lucky you might find free street parking on Sundays. Closed Mondays. Location: 221 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. 213-232-6250 or thebroad.org
Los Angeles — California Science Center: This fascinating museum in L.A.’s Exposition Park is open daily, free to visit and chock full of things to see. Kids love this place but so do adults. All permanent exhibits are free, but there’s an extra charge for the IMAX theater shows and some attractions, including the current show on Leonardo da Vinci that closes Sunday, Jan. 5. (Note that the Space Shuttle Endeavor is temporarily off exhibit.) Parking is $20 (ouch!), or you can ride the Metro. 700 Exposition Park Drive, Los Angeles. californiasciencecenter.org
Los Angeles — Getty Center: The world’s richest museum offers priceless art treasures, including Van Gogh’s “Irises,” which was the most expensive painting ever sold when the Getty bought it. The billion-dollar white complex, open Tuesdays through Sundays and free with online tickets, sits atop a hill in West Los Angeles. Kids enjoy riding the free tram to the top from the parking garage.so bring your lunch and nonalcoholic drinks. Admission is free, but timed admission tickets must be ordered online. Parking costs $20, or $15 after 3 p.m. Active and veteran U.S. military with ID park free. 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles. Getty.edu or call 310-440-7300.
Los Angeles — Griffith Observatory: Located in scenic Griffith Park and open Tuesdays through Sundays, this observatory built in 1935 is well worth seeing, including an Egyptian sundial and a Foucault pendulum. The planetarium shows cost $6-$10. Every night it’s open and the sky is clear, there are free telescopes to observe the sky. There’s a memorial monument to actor James Dean, who starred in the movie “Rebel Without a Cause,” which has a climactic scene at the observatory. Look for the Hollywood Sign behind the building. Parking is expensive; park down at the Greek Theatre and walk up, or ride the bus for 50 cents. 2800 East Observatory Road, Los Angeles. 213-473-0800 or griffithobservatory.org
Los Angeles — MOCA, Museum of Contemporary Art: Open Tuesdays-Sundays, the Museum of Contemporary Art is free to visit, with advance tickets available online. There are two facilities: A striking sandstone building across from Walt Disney Concert Hall that was designed by a famed architect Arata Isozaki at 250 S. Grand Ave., and the Geffen Contemporary in an old police car warehouse renovated by architect Frank Gehry, in Little Tokyo at 152 North Central Ave. moca.org/visit
Los Angeles — UCLA Mathias Botanical Garden in Westwood: This is one of the few free public gardens around, encompassing 7.5 acres including California natives, desert, ferns, palms, bromeliads, herbariaum and more. Open 7 days a week. You can bring your leashed pooch, too. Main entrance is at La Kretz Garden Pavilion, 707 Tiverton Drive, Los Angeles. (Campus parking in Structure 2 costs $4-16, or look for street parking.) Learn more: botgard.ucla.edu
Newhall — Placerita Canyon State Park: Take the family to the San Gabriel Mountain foothills, go for a bird walk in the oak woodlands, see the hummingbird gardens, visit the nature center and explore more than 12 miles of trails, including a seasonal stream. One trail is wheelchair friendly. Open 8 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. 19152 Placerita Canyon Road, Newhall. placerita.org
Northridge. Museum of the San Fernando Valley. Open Tuesdays, Saturdays and Sundays only. Founded in 2005, this museum is now located at the historic Rancho Cordillera del Norte in Northridge. Exhibits have included the history of author Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the Tarzan series, who founded the city of Tarzana and the history of “The Hollywood Shorties,” who were actors and stuntmen little people ranging in height from 3-foot-5 to 4-foot-9 who played baseball and basketball games for charity. 18904 Nordhoff St., Northridge. 818-347-9665 or themuseumsfvnow.org
Oak Glen — Oak Glen Preserve: Drive up to apple country for the day. Look for wildflowers and hummingbirds while strolling this property near Yucaipa owned by the Wildlands Conservancy, which includes the entire Los Rios Rancho Apple Farm. Check out the Southern California Montane Botanic Garden and Children’s Outdoor Discovery Center. Bring a picnic and walk on miles of trails. 39611 Oak Glen Road, Oak Glen. wildlandsconservancy.org/preserves/oakglen
Orange — Hilbert Museum of California Art: Check out the new expansion of this always-free museum, open Tuesdays-Saturdays in Old Town Orange near Chapman University. It specializes in California scene painting, but also has Disney art and more. 216 E. Chapman Ave. Orange. Street parking. or in the city lot in back. 714-516-5880 or hilbertmuseum.org
Pacific Palisades — Getty Villa Museum: On a spectacular site, this replica of a Roman country house contains the Getty’s collection of old and rare Greek and Roman antiquities. The villa itself is an attraction, with its mosaics, art, gardens and architecture. It’s modeled after the Villa dei Papiri that was buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79, which destroyed Pompeii. Picnics are allowed, so bring your lunch and nonalcoholic drinks. Open Wednesdays through Mondays (closed Tuesdays). Admission is free, but timed admission tickets must be ordered online. Parking costs $20, or $15 after 3 p.m. 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Pacific Palisades. getty.edu/visit/villa/
Rancho Palos Verdes — Point Vicente Interpretive Center: This place is guaranteed to lift your mood. Located on a rocky point with a spectacular ocean view, you might see whales here. The small but interesting museum explores the history of the area. Check the route before you go, because there has been some subsidence lately. 31501 Palos Verdes Drive West, Rancho Palos Verdes. And, while you’re in the area, you can also take one of the hikes in the scenic nature preserve. rpvca.gov/1204/Visit-Point-Vicente-Interpretive-Center
Riverside — California Citrus State Historical Park: Learn about the era when citrus was king in Southern California, visit the 200 acres of groves that produce navel and Valencia oranges, grapefruits, and lemons and stop by the museum visitor center. Bring a picnic! Tables are available. Hiking and biking trails are available. Citrus tastings are sometimes available. The visitor center and museum is open Fridays through Sundays. Parking is $7. 9400 Dufferin Ave., Riverside. 951-780-6222 OR parks.ca.gov/?page_id=649
Riverside — Mount Rubidoux Park: Get outside and take a walk along the wide paved trail in this landmark 161-acre city park, which offers fabulous views and even a historic bridge and tower toward the top. On average, it takes around 60 to 90 minutes to hike the hilly 3.2 mile loop trail. Park at Boniminio Park nearby and use the restroom there. Bring water. 4706 Mount Rubidoux Drive, Riverside, 951-351-6250 or riversideca.gov/park_rec/facilities-parks/mt-rubidoux
San Bernardino — Norton Air Force Base Museum: Located in the former NCO Club, this small museum tells the history of the base, which trained 30,000 pilots and became a jet aircraft maintenance facility, among other uses. The base closed in 1994. Always free, open Thursdays and Saturdays 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The museum is still looking for donations of historical items. 1601 E. 3rd St. San Bernardino. nafbmuseum.org
San Pedro — Fort MacArthur Museum: This interesting bit of military history allows visitors to take a look at underground bunkers and weaponry that were built to protect Los Angeles Harbor from enemy attacks. It was part of the Army coastal defense system from 1914 to 1974. Movies such as “Pearl Harbor,” “The Usual Suspects,” “Private Benjamin,” “Tora! Tora! Tora!” and more have been filmed here. Open Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays. Note that the Angels Gate Park with its Korean Friendship Bell is nearby. 3601 S. Gaffey St. San Pedro. 310-548-2631 or ftmac.org
San Pedro — Point Fermin Park and Lighthouse: People who love lighthouses should not miss this visit to the historic 1874 Victorian lighthouse here, one of the first in the region. The lighthouse is openTuesdays through Sundays from 1 to 4 p.m., but you must take a (free) tour at 1, 2 or 3 p.m. (Check for special closures.) The park is open every day and has beautiful coastal views, especially at sunset. Look for whales on their way to or from Baja California in season. There’s also a playground and picnic area. 807 W. Paseo Del Mar, San Pedro. 310-241-0684. discoversanpedro.org/visit/explore#http://www.pointferminlighthouse.org/
Got more suggestions? Email me at mfisher@scng.com
Watch CBS News
A rare celestial event will be taking place in the sky above California on Saturday night, as six planets are expected to be visible in what is being called a “planetary parade.”
Look towards the western horizon 30-60 minutes after sunset. Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn will all be lined up along an arc, visible to the naked eye creating a literal parade of planets.
The alignment only occurs every few years, with the next one not until 2028.
Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are frequently seen in the night sky, but the addition of Venus and Mercury make this planet lineup particularly noteworthy.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, there will be some cloud coverage Saturday evening, but it should be in the high levels of the atmosphere so hopefully the horizon remains clear. In Los Angeles and San Diego, the forecast is expected to be clear.
Meanwhile, the planetary parade may not be visible in the northern part of the state, with cloudy conditions expected Saturday night in Sacramento, and possible showers and thunderstorms in Eureka and Redding.
People with telescopes and binoculars will also be able to see Uranus and Neptune as well.
For amateur astronomers, this also would be a fun time to test out your telescope skills by checking out Jupiter’s many moons or Saturn’s rings.
Please note that if your view is obscured by buildings, trees or hills, you won’t see the parade because it will appear very low on the horizon.
The nontechnical term is Parade of Planets, but the technical term is planetary alignment. Basically, it’s just the name for what happens when the planets and sun line up in the sky, these happen during events called oppositions and conjunctions.
Opposition is the term for when a planet is directly opposite the Earth from the Sun. Meanwhile, conjunction is when they are aligned with each other and is when we get the best views of the planets.
California
‘Trump’s not enough. And he knows he’s not enough’: California governor Gavin Newsom on populism, ‘purity tests’ and whether he’ll run for the presidency
When you think of the politician Donald Trump isn’t, when you think of the norm he broke, the archetype he shattered, you might well picture a man who looks a lot like Gavin Newsom. Tall and handsome, hair coiffed just so, with a blond wife and four photogenic kids at his side, Newsom, who has been the governor of California since 2019 and is often described as the frontrunner to be the Democratic nominee for the White House in 2028, looks the way professional politicians, and especially presidential candidates, look in the movies.
It’s dogged Newsom for years, that look of his, perennially suggesting that he is, in the words of one California newspaper, “too ambitious, too slickly handsome, and too patrician-seeming”, especially for a populist age that cherishes the authentic and has no truck with anything either phoney or “elite”. The elite tag especially has hung around Newsom’s neck for decades, thanks to the fact that his ascent to the top of California politics has seemed smooth and unbroken, apparently eased by a childhood spent in the orbit of the Getty family, when that name was a byword for astronomical wealth.
Now Newsom is bent on busting those myths, laying out in a new memoir a reality that confounds the public image. Sceptics will of course assume that this is just another classic politician move: the book that precedes a campaign for national office. Even so, few readers of Young Man in a Hurry will come away thinking of its author as the “Prince Gavin” of his rivals’ caricature. Instead they will see a man, now 58, whose story is far more complex, and interesting, than the haircut and smile would have you believe – one whose life might just have equipped him to win the most powerful office in the world.
When we speak, in a conversation that will range from a devastating family history to his knack for a stunt – handing out kneepads at Davos to those politicians and corporate titans he accuses of abasing themselves before Trump – he makes his interest in the US presidency clearer than ever, even if he doesn’t quite say outright that he’s running. If there was so much as a scintilla of doubt about his intentions before we talk, not a trace of it is left afterwards. What’s more, Gavin Newsom leaves some valuable clues pointing not only to how he would seek the presidency of the United States – but why.
Via a videocall from his office in Sacramento – the same office, he points out, where “Governor Reagan, not president yet, Ronald Reagan used to reside” – he tells me that the new book “wasn’t done cynically”, that it “wasn’t done intentionally” as a political ploy; that, in fact, it came out of a rejection. In his telling, he had submitted a more conventional politician’s memoir – detailing his handling of California’s wildfires, the pandemic and “Trump 1.0” – with just one chapter on his own upbringing. The publisher read that chapter and said, “Hold on. I didn’t know anything about this.” What she had read ran so “completely counter” to what she had previously thought – the Newsom born with a presumed silver spoon in his mouth – that she demanded more.
This is what she had learned from those pages. That, yes, Newsom’s father had served as consigliere to Gordon Getty, whom he had known since high school and, in that capacity, became exceptionally close to the family, to the point where he and his two children, Gavin and sister Hilary, would feel at home at the Getty mansion on San Francisco’s Gold Coast, and would frequently accompany the clan on outrageously lavish trips abroad. Newsom describes it all: the teenage trips on “the Jetty”, the Gettys’ private plane; being kitted out by a tailor with the clothes he would need to be a house guest of the king of Spain; that time in Venice when he arrived by gondola at yet another party in a 16th-century palazzo, only to be greeted by the debauched face of Jack Nicholson. “Well, well,” said the actor, “if it isn’t the Getty boys.” The young Newsom didn’t correct him.
But, the governor now tells me, “To work for them doesn’t make you them.” For all his decades in the Gettys’ service, William Newsom “never made much money”. He was paid a salary, but it was not enormous. “It wasn’t a financial relationship … it opened up the door of privilege and opportunity, but not wealth. My father passed with nothing.”
That, though, is not the half of it. After Newsom’s parents divorced when he was three, he was raised by his mother. She worked three jobs at once, one of them as a waitress, and took in lodgers and foster children for extra cash. Gavin and his sister were latchkey kids who shared a bedroom. “We were home alone for too many hours on too many days,” he writes. “We raised ourselves on giant bowls of mac and cheese and thought nothing of it.”
The timber of his family tree is riddled with alcoholism and depression. His mother chugged wine from a jug, while her own father was so badly damaged by his experience as a prisoner of war, held by the Japanese, that he once pulled a gun on his three children, telling them very calmly, “I am going to shoot all of you right now.” He eventually took his own life.
It can be hard to square all this with the Newsom persona California voters have known for so long. He was still in his 20s when appointed to his first citywide role in San Francisco by legendary mayor Willie Brown, whom Newsom succeeded in 2004. That year, Harper’s Bazaar ran a feature on “the new Kennedys”, which included a photo of Newsom in a tuxedo, lying on a rug alongside his then wife, TV host Kimberly Guilfoyle, also in evening wear, in the Getty mansion. The marriage would break up, Guilfoyle would go on to date Donald Trump Jr, and she is now the US ambassador to Greece, while Newsom would marry Jennifer Siebel, an actor and documentary film-maker from a Republican family. But the image lingered.
For some, the disconnect between that and the upbringing Newsom describes in his book is just too much. One former associate described it to the New Yorker as Newsom’s “I was born a poor Black child” story – a reference to the spoof opening monologue of Steve Martin’s 1979 comedy The Jerk. But Newsom is emphatic that “the press’s one‑dimensional portrait of me” is wrong, that he really did live in a “duality”, moving between two worlds: one of scarcity and struggle; the other of fabulous opulence – and that, if his memoir reads like a strange mashup of The Great Gatsby and Hillbilly Elegy, that’s just how it was.
Even those reluctant to concede Newsom his hardscrabble roots have to allow that he did face one obstacle that, on its own, puts the lie to the notion of his career as a smooth ride. He has what he calls a “learning disability”, in the form of severe dyslexia. At school, he says, “I couldn’t read, I couldn’t spell, I couldn’t write.” (He is upfront that his memoir is ghostwritten.) He was sure he was stupid – “a gimpy geek with a bowl cut” – and he was regularly bullied. (They’d call him “New‑scum”, the same word hurled at him by Trump.) To this day, he can only read laboriously, underlining almost every word, then copying out the underlined passages to a notepad, and then copying those out on index cards, which he keeps in a voluminous filing system. He cannot read from an Autocue, at least not in a way most people would recognise as reading.
“We would never be having this conversation if it wasn’t for the gift of dyslexia,” he tells me. It didn’t feel like a gift at the time, but now he can see the effect it’s had. He is a “politician that doesn’t read speeches. You’ve never seen me read a written text in a speech. I don’t look up and down. I’m off script all the time.” In the age of populism, that’s a boast. Given that authenticity is probably the single most prized quality in politics, and that the opposite of authentic is scripted, Newsom is happy to tell you he is literally incapable of being scripted.
It’s had other effects, too. He can’t easily read words, so, “as a consequence, you have to make up for that. You have to read the room. You have to have some emotional intelligence. You feel things.” Besides, having to stand before audiences without the crutch of a text inevitably brings “anxiety and insecurity. And you try to make up for that. And the only way you can make up for that is hard work and grit. And you got to practise. So there’s this notion of reps and resiliency.”
No one disputes Newsom’s work ethic. As he puts it, “You’re just not going to outwork me. I mean, you may think you’re going to outwork me, but you’re not. I’m going to read 10 times more. It may take me 10 times longer to read … [but] I’m going to have to come prepared because, you know, I can’t fake it. I can’t dial it in, and I can’t dial up someone else’s words that are put on a piece of paper, like so many others in my racket, in politics. And so I’m going to spend 10 hours for 10 minutes.”
The tuxedo photoshoot made him look like a playboy – and his dating life as a divorcee mayor in the 2000s kept the San Francisco gossip columnists busily happy – but he is in fact a swot: studying ahead of every meeting, ploughing through papers on his 90-minute commute, underlining and writing out lines. That’s what he means by reps. For him, taking in information is like lifting weights: it requires repetition.
The result is a wonkishness that, again, hardly fits the show pony image. When he appeared as a guest on New York Times journalist Ezra Klein’s podcast, the two went several rounds on modular construction and the role of off-site manufacture in addressing the housing crisis. Newsom is a politician who feeds on a policy-rich diet.
That habit was shaped thanks to a brief but formative part of his career, one that sets him apart from his likely rivals for the 2028 Democratic nomination. Straight out of college, which he had reached only because he had made himself – through hours and hours of practice – a decent baseball player, a left-arm pitcher, Newsom founded a business. A wine store called PlumpJack, in homage to Falstaff, which he set up in San Francisco and where he put his hands-on work ethic to intense use. (In the book, Newsom is at pains to make clear that though Gordon Getty was an early investor, he was one of seven or eight, each giving a modest $15,000.)
PlumpJack proved a great success. It would eventually become an operation with four wineries, two boutique hotels, seven restaurants and bars, two clothes shops and 700 employees – among them, until her death at age 55 via an assisted suicide, which Newsom concedes was then illegal under California law, Newsom’s mother. Its co-presidents are Newsom’s sister Hilary and their cousin.
Newsom says it was building that business that made him a magpie for the ideas of others, agnostic as to their origin, interested solely in what brought success. “Part of being an entrepreneur,” he tells me, “is always casing other people’s joints, constantly figuring out where your competition is going, what they’re about to do, what are the trend lines … I took that and applied it to politics.”
He’s making a point about policy and the search for best practice, but the political application goes wider than that. For one thing, if Newsom is the nominee in 2028, Republicans will struggle to run what has long been one of their favourite lines against Democratic opponents: that they have never run a business, never created a job, that all they’ve known is politics. His business record is one more way in which Newsom might be able to appeal to red state voters as well as blue state ones. Yes, he is the governor of one of the most liberal states in the union, having been mayor of one of the most liberal cities in the country, the mere words “San Francisco” usually enough to whip up a rightwing crowd. But, as the veteran Democratic strategist James Carville told the New Yorker, Newsom can get around that: “Part of his selling will have to be, I can play in the middle of the country – I can play freshwater and I can play saltwater.”
The family he has today will help. Like so much else about him, it’s a duality. At first glance, it could have been designed to delight a Fox audience: the slim, blond wife alongside four kids, aged 10 to 16 – two daughters, Montana and Brooklynn, and two sons, Hunter and Dutch. But the blue state crowd will warm to the fact that Siebel has chosen to be known as the first partner of California, rather than first lady; that her documentaries interrogate themes that include the under-representation of women in positions of power and American notions of masculinity. (Newsom’s book describes the day Siebel told him about her experience at the hands of Harvey Weinstein: in 2022 she testified in court that, 17 years earlier, Weinstein had raped her in a hotel room.)
Newsom’s record is itself a duality. At one point, he tells me, “You’re talking to one of the most progressive politicians in the United States.” As if addressing the Democratic core voters who will choose a 2028 standard bearer in primaries, he rattles off the evidence, starting with the act that first made him a national figure, when just weeks after becoming mayor in 2004, he authorised the first same-sex marriages in US history, prompting thousands of lesbian and gay couples from across the country to head to City Hall in what became known as the “winter of love”. (John Kerry, his party’s presidential nominee that year, was said to have blamed Newsom’s move for his defeat, by galvanising conservatives and evangelical Christians to vote against him.)
But Newsom is just clearing his throat. He ticks off his tally of progressive achievements. “We have universal healthcare in California, regardless of immigration status and regardless of pre-existing conditions or ability to pay. We have the highest minimum wage in the United States of America for healthcare workers: $25. Fast-food workers: $20. $16.90 for everybody else.” He talks about the threat that extreme inequality between rich and poor now poses to the republic; one of his lines is, “We’ve got to democratise our economy to save our democracy.” He says that on so many issues that the New York mayor and progressive pin-up Zohran Mamdani and the left argue for, California has already forged ahead. “We’re being very aggressive calling out Trump and Trumpism, putting a mirror up to this president and punching him back in ways that are very aggressive, not just stylistically.”
He’s referring to Proposition 50, the statewide referendum Newsom pushed last November, urging Californians to agree to a redistricting plan that would give Democrats five more seats in the House of Representatives – to offset the five-seat advantage Republicans had given themselves by redrawing congressional boundaries in Texas. It was a huge gamble. Voters don’t always turn out for what can look like technical, procedural measures, and had Prop 50 lost, Newsom would have been tainted by failure, his electoral pull exposed as weak. Instead, it passed by a walloping 29 points. Overnight, Newsom had established himself as a – if not the – leader of the opposition, a Democrat not looking to split the difference but ready to take the fight to Trump and the Republicans.
And yet, that record sits alongside a résumé as a moderate Democrat, one that goes back just as long. Serving on the equivalent of San Francisco’s city council, in 2002 he antagonised the left with a scheme called Care Not Cash, which slashed payments to homeless people, using the money to fund housing and help with drug addiction and mental illness. He says it worked.
More recently, Newsom has angered the left again. Last year he launched a podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom. He knows it’s a cliche: “You roll your eyes. God, a politician, an American politician, with a podcast and a book.” But that’s not what riled many on his own side. It was his choice of guests. He has featured Steve Bannon and Maga-before-Maga talkshow host Michael Savage, whose longtime mantra was “borders, language, culture”. On his debut show, Newsom interviewed Charlie Kirk.
Naturally, Newsom was denounced for platforming – he puts the word in quotes – hate figures from the right. What’s more, on that first episode, Newsom mused that transgender athletes’ participation in professional women’s sports was “deeply unfair”. The backlash was immediate. Many detected a political calculation, Newsom signalling that he understood the much‑discussed vibe shift revealed by the defeat of Kamala Harris a few months earlier and pointedly breaking from the activist left of his party.
The governor insists it was nothing of the sort. His view was shaped, he says, by practical experience. Two years earlier, “we had some statewide championships in track and field, where there was a trans athlete that was successful in [defeating] another athlete. And there was tremendous controversy. We tried to accommodate for that and address the issue of fairness and some advantages that I think, by any objective standards, existed and persisted. And the difficulty was we couldn’t figure it out.” A year later, the issue recurred and, again, Newsom could not see a fair solution. “And so Charlie Kirk asked me a direct question, and I answered it.”
He says he’s sorry that he hurt the feelings of some on his own side, but he thinks the response he got teaches its own lesson. “Frankly, we were becoming a little too judgmental as a party … this idea that somehow you’re countenancing a point of view or perspective by engaging in conversations, that somehow you’re complicit … There was a purity test” – according to which nothing less than total orthodoxy on key issues is good enough. “I have a difference of opinion with my party on sports for transgender athletes. And there was tremendous judgment and condemnation for that point of view, somehow saying I’ve abandoned the LGBTQ community. I’ve walked away. I’m throwing them under the bus. I think it’s that kind of tonality that pulls people away.”
Newsom says he’s interested in finding those areas where Democrats and Republicans might come together. Just as likely, he wants to see where Democrats might win over former Republicans and gain their votes. He’s back to casing the competing joints, looking for the clues that Republican success in 2024 left behind. He consumes rightwing media, watching more Fox News than he ever watched MSNBC, now rebranded as MS NOW, and is particularly keen to work out how the right cuts through among young men. That’s a trick Democrats need to match.
Still, it’s a duality: Newsom simultaneously the most pugnacious Democrat on the playing field – trolling the president with Trump-style social media posts, complete with capital letters and multiple exclamation marks – and the advocate of building bridges that might connect blue and red America. That connection has to happen, he says, because “divorce is not an option”.
Can you be both at once: attack dog and unifier? Newsom thinks so. When I offer a range of apparently competing strategies for opposing Trump, some on the offensive, some aimed at accommodation, asking which he prefers, he answers, “All of them.” He sees no reason to choose.
“I mean, you can stand your ground, be firm, but also have an open hand, not a closed fist in terms of dealing with our common humanity. This notion that it’s got to be one or the other, that’s the tyranny of ‘or’ versus the genius of ‘and’ … I think there’s nuances in life. It’s not black and white. It’s not binary. I think that’s the way we need to approach life.”
He extends that – sort of – even to Trump himself. In the book, he describes an encounter during Trump’s first term, where the governor and the president rode on Air Force One together. The Trump that Newsom saw seemed eager, in private, to win him over, to josh with him, to be liked by him. He looked needy. Is Newsom saying he almost felt sorry for Donald Trump?
“He wants to be loved. He needs to be loved. Yes, he’s a narcissist. He’s desperate for it. He doesn’t care if he’s the heel or the hero, as long as he’s the star … He’s broken in many ways. That’s why he tried to break this country on January 6 … and why he will do more to destroy this republic, today, tomorrow and into the future. It’s a tragic story, but it’s a very human story.
“You know, I think it’s why he desperately needed to become president of the United States again. It’s why he’s trying to rename everything in his image. It’s never enough, because he’s not enough and he knows he’s not enough. And I think the remarkable thing is how easy it is to play on that. How easily our foreign adversaries are able to manipulate him.”
It’s one thing to play him, Newsom says, “but you also have to stand up to him. You’ve got to fight him, you’ve got to fight the bully. I felt like the [Mark] Carney [at Davos] speech represented that … [Emmanuel] Macron began to sort of lean into that. There’s a new tone and tenor.” He wants to see the post-1945 transatlantic alliance survive, he says, and that requires strength in the face of Trump. At Davos, he urged European leaders to realise that “grovelling to Trump’s needs” makes them “look pathetic on the world stage”.
We’ve talked for a while and the subject can be avoided no longer: is Gavin Newsom going to run for president? I remind him that he once said that it’s “better to be candid than be coy”. He laughs, adding, “I shouldn’t have said that” – and so I urge him to be candid now. An easy question first. He doesn’t have to tell me what he’s decided, but has he made up his mind about running?
“Absolutely, I have not.” He says he cannot know now what the moment will require in 2028. But he’s clear that, if he runs, he won’t be doing it to fill a psychic hole, like Trump. It won’t be to make up for a lack of parental love. For all her challenges, his mother “did give me a lot of hugs. And I was loved by my dad, despite the fact he could never say it.” If he does it, it will be because he thinks he can be “a solution to a problem”. He says that for a guy like him, who got a low SAT score of 960 – he urges me to look that up, to see how bad it is – even to be asked such a question is humbling. “And so I’m not going to say no, because I’d be lying by saying that, but I absolutely cannot say yes.”
I push him a bit more. What if the threat to democracy is as sharp in 2028 as he believes it is now?
He says “something shifted in me” at two points in 2025. One was in January, just ahead of Trump’s second term, when, as Newsom saw it, Trump tried to “weaponise” the California wildfires, seeking to extract political advantage from an opponent and a hostile blue state in distress. The second came in the summer, when Trump deployed the National Guard in Los Angeles, along with 700 active duty marines. They “were not sent overseas but were sent to the second largest city in the United States”.
That January, “I was experiencing something I was not prepared for. A president-elect trying to take down an American city, trying to take down an American politician in a way that I, frankly, was not prepared for. Six months later, with the National Guard, I just started to shift tonally, my temperament, my approach.”
He says that he’s on “the other side” of that shift. “There’s a freedom now that I feel. And I’m running around Davos with kneepads, taking shots at folks that I used to admire and respect that I feel have sold their souls. And this is an existential moment that goes to your question. If someone else doesn’t have that fire, that sense of purpose and mission, then, yeah, I could see myself stepping into that void.”
It’s not an announcement, but it’s not far off it. It comes from a man who has never lost an election and who always comes prepared. And he’s preparing right now.
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