The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 25 episode of theDaily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
California Governor Gavin Newsom is breaking through the noise in a way that no other Democrat is right now. Part of this is because he’s forging ahead with a plan to gerrymander California to net five extra Democratic House seats in order to counter President Trump’s effort to do the same in Texas. But we think there are deeper reasons Newsom is breaking through right now and that Democrats can learn from them. This was clearly on display when Newsom recently issued a stark warning about Trump’s long-term intentions. In so doing, he connected the dots in a way that Democrats rarely do. We’re talking about all this with Will Stancil, a policy researcher and attorney in Minneapolis who’s been a relentless online critic of the Democratic Party’s failure to rise to this moment. He’s developed an interesting set of arguments about what’s happening in our politics. Will, thanks for coming on.
Will Stancil: Glad to be here.
Sargent: So the California legislature has passed a plan to pave the way for redrawing the lines on the state’s House seats. Newsom signed it. Now it goes to the voters in a special election this November. What’s interesting to me is that there’s nothing mealy-mouthed about any of this. Newsom’s saying, You’re damn friggin’ right we’re going to gerrymander if the Republicans are. Dems don’t usually talk like this. What’s your overall take on where this all is?
Stancil: I think he’s doing the right thing. He is being honest about the moment. He’s being honest about what’s happening in Texas. He’s not beating around the bush or pretending that he’s advancing some lofty procedural goal. He’s saying we’re here to win. We can’t let these guys win, so we’re going to do what we can to try to win. And honestly, it kills me to say this—because I’ve not traditionally been a big Gavin Newsom fan—but I’ve been waiting a long time to hear Democrats talk like this.
Sargent: So have I, man. And I think that’s really the critical point. He’s not taking the procedural high road. He’s saying we have to win because if they win, we’re screwed.
Stancil: Yeah. He’s being very blunt about the potential risks of a Trump presidency. Obviously, we’ve seen a lot of those, but even greater ones lie ahead. And he is responding in the way that you would respond if you truly believed that these things lay in our future.
Sargent: In fact, what Gavin Newsom said—that I’m going to highlight here—gets at this. Listen to this. It’s from a podcast the other day.
Gavin Newsom (audio voiceover): I said that what’s happening in L.A. and the federalization of the National Guard, sending of the United States military, the Marines—700 of them, 4,700 in total—is a preview of things to come across this country. What you saw happen with the border patrol and ICE is a preview of things to come in front of voting booths. They’re going to try to suppress voting this November. This is existential, this moment. He’s trying to rig this one by literally shutting down mail-in voting. This is happening. Everyone, wake up. Wake up. He’s militarizing American cities. This is Putin’s playbook. This is authoritarianism. It’s happening.
Sargent: I think that’s striking stuff because Newsom is connecting all these different dots into a bigger story—like run through it. ICE will intimidate voters in the 2026 midterms. Trump will abuse presidential power to try to end vote by mail completely. He’s threatened to do that. He will do military maneuvers in our cities, probably in the run-up to 2026, to foment a crisis atmosphere that he thinks will help the GOP. And he’s linking all of that directly to the Texas gerrymander, which Trump is openly pushing in order to rig the elections. And critically, Newsom said explicitly that all of what Trump is doing now on these fronts is a preview of much worse to come in our elections. That’s what we need, Will: the big story being told. Your thoughts?
Stancil: I totally agree. I think that what Newsom is doing is he’s finally doing what Democrats should have been doing for a decade. There is a singular factor in American politics since probably 2015 or so, and that’s Donald Trump. He’s defined American politics since 2015. And what we have seen, especially since Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, is that Democrats have been afraid to talk about it directly. They beat around the bush. They talk about how they want to work with Trump. They talk about how they want to focus on kitchen-table issues, they want to lower prices. They’re afraid of being accused of having Trump derangement syndrome. They’ll be afraid of being accused of focusing on nothing else. They’re afraid of being accused of abandoning the working man.
In the meantime, in the country that I’ve lived in—in the real world—everything has revolved around Trump. Everything has been propelled forward by the choices he’s making, the things he’s done. Even when he’s out of office, this has largely been the case. And so finally, we have a Democrat who seems to have thrown those worries to the wind. He seems to be saying, I don’t care if you think I’m obsessed. It’s worth being obsessed. This is scary stuff. This is a scary man. He’s going to ruin our country. And I’m going to fight him as if I believe that was true. And it’s striking. And what I also think is interesting about it is that it’s working.
Sargent: When you say it’s working, what are you referring to?
Stancil: People are paying attention to him as a leader of the Democratic Party in a way that I don’t think anyone has achieved—other than Joe Biden by virtue of being elected president—since Trump entered politics. Right now, Gavin Newsom is seen, I would say, as Trump’s primary opponent in American politics. And he has put himself in that position by taking him on directly and talking directly about the threat he poses.
Sargent: I want to bear down on this thing you said a little earlier about how Newsom is not afraid to act as if Trump is at the very center of everything. Newsom’s own evolution is kind of interesting here. After Trump won, when Trump took over in January, Newsom started out in the wrong way, I think. He was really playing footsie with MAGA and playing footsie with Trumpism. He did all that podcasting with the right-wingers. I think there’s still a little bit of that going on, but less. And at the center of what Newsom was doing then was this media-friendly reading of Trump and the Trump phenomenon, which essentially said right-wing populism is a very durable force in our politics. It’s shaping everything right now. The only way for Democrats to succeed is to essentially feed that phenomenon in their own way, find their way to reconcile themselves to it. That was a disaster for Newsom, right? It’s only when he actually forgets about that and accepts this idea that MAGA is a singularly destructive force in American life through Donald Trump that he actually starts to succeed. What do you think of that?
Stancil: To be clear, I said at the start of this, I’m not a big Gavin Newsom fan traditionally. And part of that is this approach earlier in the year. I think Gavin Newsom has been fairly accused of being an opportunist. He’s looking for a way to gain attention, to fit himself to politics of the time. And one of the ways that this really profoundly demonstrated itself is what he did at beginning of the year when he was seemingly for the whole bit shifting to this conciliatory pose toward really awful people—people who are, frankly, white supremacists and racists and bigots and authoritarians. And then there were some policy positions as well on involving trans people and trans people in sports that I found personally quite offensive and things I wouldn’t think that any Democrats should ever compromise on, selling people’s rights out essentially. So I was pretty upset about that. And I thought Gavin Newsom is a slime ball and you can’t trust him. But I guess one of the advantages, it turns out, of being an opportunist who’s flexible is that you are iterating always to see what works. And he has iterated himself to something that does seem to work. And what that is is this intense anti-Trumpism.
Now I’m going to do a little self-promotion here because in some ways I’ve been writing on this for seven years now—
Sargent: Don’t worry Will, we’ll edit this part out.
Stancil: Yeah, go ahead [laughs]. No, but seven years ago I wrote an op-ed in The Atlantic saying that Democrats need to focus solely on opposing Trump. That the nature of American politics right now is about Trump. The largest coalition available to Democrats is the one that opposes Trump. An anti-Trump coalition unites all of the factions that the Democrats can conceivably get. And if you’re not in the anti-Trump coalition, you’ve got no chance of getting them anyway. And the Democrats need to stop worrying so much about being saying they’re obsessed with Trump and just understand this is the reality of the time. Focus on attacking him, on bringing Trump down, and then we’ll work it out after he’s gone.
And what I think has been striking about this to me personally is that while there have been people that have attempted this in dribs and drabs at various points, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone who has jumped in head first—especially with the platform that Newsom has right now. And to my eyes, it’s really working. You’re seeing people get on board. You’re seeing a lot of enthusiasm from Newsom for people that would not be inclined to support him. Even MAGA is starting to notice that something’s happening here, that this guy’s landing some hits and that it’s not all words too. He’s doing things like the redistricting. He’s really doing it. So I have to say that I’ve suspected for a long time that something like this was the way to go, but I am pleased to see that it does appear to be succeeding so far. I can’t think of anything that a Democrat is doing right now that is even coming close to working as well as this.
Sargent: It is working, and the media is taking notice. And in an irony, the media is actually coming up with a way to describe this that downplays the threat of Trump as well. They’re diagnosing why Newsom is breaking through right now by saying things like he’s tweeting in all caps, right, just like Trump does. They point to his trolling of Trump or his using of Trump-like memes. Brian Beutler, who to his great credit has been way out front on all this stuff, had a good piece arguing that Newsom is acting as an antidote to “the dead-enderism of liberal rectitude politics,” as he put it. I think that’s right.
The trolling and the social media stuff—that’s not what’s allowing Newsom to break through, although it probably helps. It’s that Newsom is saying two things. First, we’re not going to let Republicans play by different rules anymore. And second, we are going to use our power however we can, no matter what The New York Times editorial board says about it, to prevent Republicans from getting away with that anymore.
Stancil: He’s not saying he’s sorry. He’s not apologizing for anything. And I think that liberals sometimes apologize literally for the stuff they do when they push the boundary like that. Other times there’s just something apologetic in their demeanor. They’re embarrassed to be doing it. And I think that it is crippling. What Newsom has been doing, I would describe it as almost a kitchen-sink approach. He is taking aggressive procedural steps forward with the gerrymandering. He is also doing Twitter trolling and all-caps tweeting and whatever he can to go after Trump. He is also going out and talking directly, very bluntly about the threat the authoritarianism poses. He’s attacking Trump on every front they can think of. And when they think of a new one, they do it.
I’m sure that in the long run, if he keeps this up, there will be efforts—or with things he attempts to break through—which he doesn’t expect. There’s also going to be some stuff that falls flat. That’s just the nature of this. No one can predict in advance what’s going to work. But part of the reason that that energetic try-everything politics works is that you don’t know, and so you find stuff that is effective. Republicans do this relentlessly. This is the key, in my opinion, to a lot of their success, to a lot of MAGA’s success. MAGA does a lot of stuff that is unbelievably stupid and goes nowhere. Many of Trump’s more authoritarian efforts to procedurally game the system or overturn laws or destroy the federal government have fallen flat. But he has still gotten a long way down the field by just trying everything and finding things that are working out better than you might have expected. And so it is immense relief to finally see a Democrat who is erring on the side of action instead of erring on the side of caution.
Sargent: Right. And by the way, I think there’s another reason that Republicans do what you’re talking about, which is that they understand that shaping the info environment in some big sense is more important than whether you get judged for the unpopularity of a particular policy you stand for. There’s one example that I always keep coming back to. I’ve said it on the show before, so apologies to people who have heard this, but while back during the Biden presidency, MAGA and all their media sources hit on this really fucking dumb attack on Biden. It was that he was diverting baby formula to migrant babies. Do you remember that, Will?
Stancil: Vaguely. Yeah.
Sargent: It was the dumbest thing ever, right? But the thing that really left out to me was that every single Republican elected official and every one of their Twitter accounts and every one of their media people all blared it out. They didn’t give a shit if people thought it was stupid. The noise level was the thing they were going for. You know what I mean?
Stancil: The thing about being a Democrat is that dealing with Republicans operating like this is overwhelming. The stuff that they are saying coming out constantly, new fake scandals, new fake outrages every day—as a liberal, your response sometimes is, Let’s refute this line by line. But by the time you do that, there’s six new things. And the effect it has on the information environmental line—where it’s just this flood on one side and the other side is people so far behind trying to catch up and refute things point by point—really distorts how our politics functions. And there’s no reason we can’t do this ourselves. In fact, there are a lot more things to be legitimately outraged by on our side, [things] that Trump’s truly doing that are really outrageous, that are offenses to the entire American Constitution and our system and our laws. But we just don’t operate like this. We just don’t want to operate like this. For some reason, we’re afraid to try it. And I really think that if we try it, there is a lot of power here that we can potentially exploit to first win the public opinion, win hearts and minds, persuade people and ultimately win elections and take electoral power.
Sargent: Yeah. And I get the problem for Democrats. A lot of it has to do with a reluctance, which is understandable on the part of liberals to play these games and to degrade our politics and information world in that way. That’s an understandable concern. The point, though, that I think you’re getting at is that there’s enough real stuff, true stuff that Democrats could be going after hard to make that level of noise without doing what Republicans are doing, without degrading our politics in some sense, right?
Stancil: That’s correct. And I think that there was a time when you would say things like, Trump’s an authoritarian, Trump’s a fascist, and people would say, Calm down. Let’s not get overheated here. Let’s stick to the real things. He’s cutting taxes for the rich. But what’s interesting is that as those charges have become more demonstrated in the fact of what he’s doing, as he’s behaved in ways that are straightforwardly authoritarian and anyone would have said so 10 years ago, Democrats have not really upped their rhetoric to match. They stayed focused on these issues that they feel are safe to talk about. And sometimes they’ve even left those issues and retreated to even more boring issues when they felt like that the kitchen-table issues—taxes or crime, whatever—had become too controversial.
And so I think that what you see ultimately here is that Democrats—it’s not so much that they are making a tactical decision, it’s that they’re temperamentally conflict-averse. Liberals tend to be people who got where they are by following the rules and doing a good job and thinking things through and being detail-oriented. And they’re just temperamentally averse to an approach to politics in which you are winging it a lot and you are throwing things at the wall and you are being energetic and aggressive in chasing every lead. And I think that temperamental gap creates this rhetorical gap. And what we’re seeing now with Newsom is that he has closed a lot of that to significant success.
Sargent: And by the way, a lot of people might object to what we’re saying here by pointing out that, Well, don’t Democrats have to focus on what’s popular? What about moderate Democrats in difficult areas? I’m sensitive to all that. I think an approach like this can coexist with your typical swing district Democrat maybe wanting to do things a little differently. There just has to be some sense among all the institutional players in the party that they need to make more noise of the type that we’re talking about. And if moderates want to go in certain directions in their states or districts, I think that’s OK. Do you think that’s a hard balance to strike, Will?
Stancil: I don’t think it’s particularly difficult to strike. Most Democrats are not in swing districts. Most Democrats are not representing battleground districts. If you are a Democrat and you’re just in an ordinary Democratic district, if you’re winning by reasonable margins most of the time, there is no reason in the world that you should be weakening the brand of the Democratic Party by being weak on Trump. There’s no reason you should be avoiding Trump. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be talking about the most urgent issues in the country, the authoritarianism and Trump’s unfitness, all the time. If there’s someone in a district that is plus two points Republican and they have to really identify themselves as separate from the party and show their independence, fine, let them. I don’t care at all. That’s great. If they can win that election and they stay Democrat, that’s wonderful. But we don’t help them by being them. We help them by being us and letting them have the independence to do what they need.
Sargent: I agree 100 percent with that. And by the way, there’s one other objection we should probably deal with. This is something I think I’ve seen you tackle before, but there’s a sense out there that if a number of Democrats in safe areas do stuff like this, it taints the overall party in some sense and paints the party as a larger entity as not being in touch with what real people think about and feel on a daily basis. I feel like that’s a problematic way of thinking about politics. I just don’t really buy that there’s this real calculation on the part of voters, where they see that type of conduct from Democrats in non–swing districts and say, Well, the whole party isn’t interest in my pocketbook or my wallet. What do you think, Will? What do you think the answer to that is?
Stancil: Well, I’ve got two points. First off, Republicans have plenty of people, plenty of representatives, plenty of people who are affiliated with the party in very substantial ways up to and including their president and vice president acting in ways that are outright deranged. And if voters are really so sensitive to the slightest wobble from normal everyman behavior, they would never vote for a Republican ever again. Seriously, clearly it’s just not that bad to have some crazies in your party because the ruling party in the U.S. right now is the craziest party I’ve ever seen. The other thing I’d say is that Democrats have to remember what they’ve done to attract most of their voters. Most vote—there’s an obsessive interest, and I understand why from a tactical standpoint, on swing voters. But the vast majority of Democrats aren’t Democrats because they have been narrowly appeal to by what I would describe as swing-voter appeals, swing-voter kitchen-table issues.
The vast majority of Democrats are Democrats because the larger value set that Democrats represent: the rule of law, democracy, an open pluralistic country, economic prosperity, helping people in need. Those values appeal to Democrats.
Sargent: Let’s just close this out by looking at what I think is a core dimension to what Newsom’s doing here. It’s that he’s acting as if Donald Trump is using the specter of state-sponsored violence, military violence, law enforcement violence, and naked corruption to further entrench authoritarian rule and consolidate autocratic power behind himself. Newsom is proceeding as if that’s what Trump is doing—and that is what Trump actually is doing. Newsom is connecting all these dots to tell that story and say this reality is why we’ve got to really step up. And of course, other Democrats, although there are some exceptions, are not acting as if that’s happening. Can you talk about that fundamental thing that Newsom’s doing? That seems to me to be the key.
Stancil: Something that Democrats and liberals generally, and I think it’s even includes a lot of journalists, do when it comes to Republicans is they feel compelled to give them the benefit of the doubt. And so every story, every outrage, every scandal is framed in a way that is most favorable to the Republican—because they’re afraid of being accused of overreaching, of being biased. So Trump puts armed troops in D.C. and you see people say, Well, is this really the best crime fighting remedy? No, that is not the concern with putting armed troops in D.C. The concern is that it is an authoritarian outrage that would have been inconceivable in American politics even six months ago.
And when you say that, Republicans come back and say, Oh, well, it’s just about crime, and they don’t—so they feel compelled to give them the benefit of the doubt. What Newsom is doing is he is not giving them the benefit of the doubt. He is responding to the obvious implications of what Trump is doing rather than quibbling over whether or not that’s what he’s doing. He is just assuming the worst about Trump—which is safe because Trump is usually doing the worst thing that you can imagine—and going from there and not apologizing for it. This is how Republicans talk about Democrats. A Democrat does something that has any hint of corruption or scandal about it, Republicans just assume that’s true and then proceed from there. They don’t sit there and say, Well, let’s look at it the most favorable light. That’s crazy, and yet it’s been immensely difficult to find a Democrat or someone in media who’s not in progressive media that is willing to do that.
It’s really completely transformed his ability to talk about Trump. Suddenly, he doesn’t have these restrictions on how he talks. He can just describe it in plain language like a normal human being would do, and it’s been revelatory to see.
Sargent: And it’s revelatory for voters as well, I think. Revelatory for them to see that a Democrat can talk that way. Will Stancil, great to talk to you, man. Really fun. Thanks for coming on.
Stancil: Absolutely. Yeah, thank you.
The post Transcript: Gavin Newsom’s Harsh Trump Takedown Nails It: “Wake Up!” appeared first on New Republic.
