Erika D. Smith, Columnist

Gavin Newsom’s Political Paradoxes

January 6, 2026 at 12:30 PM UTC

Erika D. Smith is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. She is a former Los Angeles Times columnist and Sacramento Bee editorial board member.

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California Governor Gavin Newsom still won’t say for sure whether he plans to run for president in 2028. Nevertheless, he ended 2025 as a frontrunner — if not the frontrunner — in a nascent-but-crowded field of ambitious Democrats eyeing the White House.

All it took was a willingness to relentlessly troll President Donald Trump and members of his administration in a way that they’ve never been trolled before. But that was, arguably, the easy part.