Occasional California Governor Gavin Newsom, who keeps turning up anywhere but California, has continued his highly calculated descent into vulgar and insulting behavior this week. The performance still has the awkwardness of the first week of acting school. It’s like watching a character play a character, many times removed from an identifiable real person. Whatever he’s doing, he’s definitely pretending.
If you’ve missed it, Newsom is back to doing subtext-heavy locker room kneepad jokes like the one he did in Davos, and he’s bragging to audiences that he’s stupid like them, “a 960 SAT guy.” He’s playing a towel-snapper, a mean jock, not above hard words or a fist fight. His relentlessly horrible director of communications got in on the act, responding to questions from a journalist like this: