Many people are asking: What is the deal with Gavin Newsom? Since Donald Trump returned to office, the governor has gained a lot of new fans across the country for trolling Trump online, often responding to the insane president’s ravings with satirical mockery of them. He’s pretty good at it.
But at the same time, Newsom has hosted a podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom, where he’s welcomed people as vile and/or ridiculous as Trump himself, or even more so, if that’s even possible: people like Steve Bannon and Michael Savage and the late Charlie Kirk, whom Newsom mournfully eulogized as his “friend” after Kirk was assassinated. Newsom tore up a homeless encampment for a photo op. He has thrown trans people under the bus.
He can’t be pinned down, Gavin. He’s a maverick. He’s a mystery inside a riddle wrapped in the New York Times’ opinion pages. Or anyway, so he hopes people will think. His whole trip is the same as that of the Democratic Party’s leadership: He’s triangulating—hoping, as he eyes a run for the presidency, to keep his liberal base intact while also appealing to the “ordinary Americans” whom he imagines, often correctly, are bigots and revel in displays of cruelty toward the homeless. He has called on the Democratic Party to be less “woke,” and more “culturally normal,” while offering no examples of “wokeness” or cultural abnormality among Democrats.
For some reason—consultants … the reason is consultants—such Democrats believe that by having no genuine worldview and by cosplaying as “bipartisan,” they’ll appeal to people of all worldviews. The fact that this strategy has repeatedly failed them, and brought us a national government led by fascist lunatics, does not seem to dissuade them one bit.
When it comes to weed, the story is sort of the same. Newsom desperately wants to be seen as “reasonable” on cannabis policy. He was an early and effective advocate for legalization, and he has done some things to shore up a broken legal-weed industry. But he has also failed to do what is necessary to allow the industry to thrive: chiefly, cut the state’s onerous 15% excise tax on pot sales.
As of April 2026, a google search with Newsom’s name and “cannabis” produces results that are overwhelmed by his massive assaults on illicit pot growers and peddlers. Cracking down on illicit weed helps the legal industry somewhat, but only by the thinnest of margins. It is, however, a way for him to look like he’s doing something about the industry’s problems. And it helps him strengthen his “law and order” credentials (“dope on the table”). Meanwhile the industry continues to struggle and illicit weed, which is way cheaper than what people can get at their local dispensaries, continues to thrive.
Newsom did sign a bill to roll back a hike in the excise tax, which had brought it to a ridiculous 19% for the last half of 2025, and to keep it from rising again until at least 2028. Earlier, he spearheaded the elimination of the state’s cultivation tax. And he’s signed on with enough other reforms that the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws has given him a grade of A-minus—though it seems they gave that grade in 2022 and haven’t updated it.
If the overall state of the industry is a good guide to how well or badly Newsom has done on cannabis policy since legalization, Newsom’s record is, at best, mixed. California’s legal industry peaked in 2021, boosted partly by the Covid epidemic, at $5.35 billion. In 2025, the industry recorded sales of just $4.4 billion, a drop of nearly one-fifth.
That’s not all Newsom’s fault, of course, but cannabis reform is one of his signature issues he will bring with him to the 2028 primaries. He might give himself a bit of a leg up if he can do something to help the California cannabis industry recover by then. But he would do even better if he stopped trying to appeal to America’s reactionaries. If he keeps up with that schtick nobody, including weed-industry advocates or even the people who love his Trump-trolling, will have any reason to trust him.
[Editor’s note: This article was written before the Trump administration’s April 23, 2026, order to move FDA-approved and state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act.]
