The case for Gavin Newsom is simple. The Republicans nominated someone with no positive qualities, and they won bigly. Now it is our turn to nominate someone with no positive qualities.
Positive qualities, the case goes, are overrated. They can get you a billion dollars, or a Nobel, or some other consolation prize. To become President, you must be chosen by God.
Donald Trump was chosen by God. You can tell because he's invincible. He can wriggle out of scandals that would sink Tricky Dick Nixon ten times over. He can run on a platform of punishing illegal immigrants, and the illegal immigrants themselves will rally to his banner. He can support Israel harder than anyone has ever supported it before, and Arab-Americans will break fifty years of Voting Blue No Matter Who to march behind him. He can get 100% evangelical backing while oozing contempt for Christianity, 100% libertarian support while trampling the Constitution, and 100% allegiance from Wall Street while dismantling global trade. KKK wizards and celebrity rappers compete to compliment him loudest; Nazis and the ADL jostle past each other to sing his praises. Shooting him in the head only makes him stronger.
To posit Trump's divine election is not to imply he has any positive qualities. When the Israelites stopped obeying the commandments, God punished them by raising an incompetent idolator named Jeroboam to the throne. Jeroboam started a disastrous war that killed 500,000 of his own men, after which his dynasty collapsed and his entire family was slain. Jeroboam was chosen by God to crush and humiliate Israel. But he was chosen by God. Has America been obeying the commandments lately?
The Bible describes the specific way that divine election works. In 1 Samuel 8, the Israelites noticed that all the cool countries had kings, and asked the prophet Samuel to choose a king for them too. Samuel picked:
…Saul, a handsome young man. There was not a man among the people of Israel more handsome than he. From his shoulders upward he was taller than any of the people.
This is how the prophets of our own time chose Trump too. In 2011, Mencius Moldbug mooted Donald Trump as a potential King of America, saying:
What do you think Americans respond to in “The Donald” and Gov. Christie? To the obvious kinginess of these figures. Supreme personal authority, generally male, is a normal human function and one we recognize instinctively. The job of King does not exist, at least not in the public sector, but the Trumps and Christies come as close to it as possible and are clearly biologically suited for the position.
And Richard Hanania, who predicted Trump’s second term, said his victory would be due to “the biomechanics”. Quoting and splicing liberally:
Republicans deal in the currency of dominance. Conservative politics has been for decades shaped by larger-than-life alpha male personalities . . . If what Trump does can be learned, and pick-up artists tell you it can, it takes years of concentrated effort. Other important differences, like the fact that Trump is simply taller than DeSantis, aren’t even fixable in theory.
Trump is tall (6 foot 3 inches). He has impressive hair, or an impressive toupee, or whatever it is that he has. His favorite facial expression is this one, but he can also do this one when appropriate, and even this one. He has never apologized for anything in his life (or, if he has, he will lie about it to your face and sue you if you mention it, which works out the same way). He is obviously fighty, not in a frantic try-hard Ron DeSantis way, but in a weird Daoist sense where he is an immovable mountain that occasionally emits avalanches that bury everyone else.
You and I are not impressed by any of this. But you and I supported Andrew Yang, or John Kasich, or Martin O’Malley, or some other person who never made it past the primaries. Your and my impression of a presidential candidate is actively anti-correlated with their chances of winning. So if you and I were smart, we would stop pushing Buttigieg / Romney ‘28 and start trying to find a person who is chosen by God, ie very tall.
Gavin Newsom is - oh, that’s interesting - 6 foot 3 inches. His favorite facial expressions are this one and this one, but he also managed to pull off this one without losing all support and having his campaign instantly collapse. He has the most dignified salt-and-pepper hair, and the whitest teeth, of all 40 million people in America’s most populous state. His family photos look like this:
And his magazine profiles look like . . . oh, that’s also interesting:
His Twitter account looks like this:
. . . and demonstrates exactly the same level of comedic genius as the man who coined classics like “Sleepy Joe Biden”. This is truly someone who can meet the American public at their own level.
I take no pleasure in reporting that Gavin Newsom was chosen by God. I think he has been a mediocre California governor. There are highlights: he’s been excellent on YIMBY issues, hasn’t interfered with the positive changes happening in San Francisco, and (always a good sign when you have to mention this one) most of the state’s problems pre-date his term. On the other hand, he has done little to solve most of them beyond stunts highlighting how progressive he is, and he’s been comically corrupt (which I think is better than being non-comically corrupt; Trump survives his many scandals because on the whole they’re pretty funny).
Still, when someone is chosen by God, what can you do? Surely it’s a waste of time to hand out Buttigieg / Romney ‘28 yard signs in such a situation; far better to get with the program. Trump is hardly an intellectual, but various people with strong beliefs - Peter Navarro, RFK Jr, Stephen Miller, Curtis Yarvin - hitched themselves to his star and got a chance to change the world. Gavin Newsom, who interviewed Ezra Klein on his podcast and whose one really outstanding issue in California has been YIMBYism, presents a similar opportunity for abundance Democrats. My main priority for 2028 is to avoid giving the GOP a chance to consolidate what they’re trying to do to the country. As for my second priority - not returning to the crazier forms of leftism - I can only trust that the same venality that made Newsom hyper-progressive in hyper-progressive California will make him somewhat more moderate on the somewhat-more-moderate national stage.
I believe Gavin Newsom will beat JD Vance. JD Vance is 6 foot 2 inches. His favorite facial expression, I am told, is this one, but this one and this one also need to be taken into consideration. His family photos are perhaps not a perfect match for the direction of the modern conservative movement. His hair is merely average. He has a normal number of teeth.
But even more than that, I have a sort of pre-intellectual, maybe even pre-verbal intuition that the genre conventions don’t permit a Vance victory. JD Vance seems to have, at some point, had positive qualities. He was intelligent. He rose from humble birth. He had a certain level of sympathy for others who started in the same place, and a certain level of curiosity about their problems. He has since betrayed all of those good qualities faster than anyone has ever betrayed anything before, backstabbed them then murdered them then pissed on their bodies then placed the urine-stained corpses in the stocks as an object of general ridicule. Every night he prays to Satan that he has humiliated himself and his values enough for their contract to still be on. But it will not be enough. JD Vance's genre is Greek tragedy - the potentially superior man who gives up everything for victory, then, at the end, has victory yanked away. He has to lose. Gavin Newsom, a man who never had any positive qualities to begin with, has been destined from birth to beat him.
The rest of us are bit players in this drama. The best we can do is try to make the best of it: raise high the Bear Flag and jockey for praetorships and quaestorships in the great Californian Empire that is to come. I am no longer Ridin’ With Biden. Now I’m Gruesome For Newsom.
