Gavin Newsom has a job. It’s listed in the California state constitution. It involves a state of nearly forty million people, a homeless crisis that swallows roughly half the nation’s unsheltered population, structural deficits running into the tens of billions, and a population exodus measured in seven figures since 2020. None of that, apparently, is as urgent as photoshopping his own face onto a fake driver’s license.
This week, after the State Department unveiled a limited-edition passport commemorating America’s 250th anniversary that features an image of President Donald Trump on the inside cover, California’s governor decided the appropriate response from the chief executive of the most populous state in the union was to mock it.
His press office posted a parody driver’s license bearing Newsom’s own portrait, written in the all-caps cadence he has been imitating from Trump’s social media feed for months now.
“IN HONOR OF CALIFORNIA’S 175TH ANNIVERSARY, WE WILL BE ROLLING OUT A VERY SPECIAL DRIVER’S LICENSE FOR EVERY CALIFORNIAN THIS SUMMER!” the post declared. “MANY PEOPLE ARE SAYING IT’S THE BEST LICENSE EVER MADE IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD.”
The White House responded with a level of seriousness the moment did not deserve. Trump “is focused on saving our country—not garnering recognition,” a spokesperson said, adding that anyone offended by the commemorative passport “clearly suffers from a severe and incurable disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
That diagnosis lands closer to the truth than Newsom’s communications team probably realizes. The governor of California has spent the better part of a year operating a satirical Trump tribute account out of his official press office. He has posted mock passports pairing the president with Jeffrey Epstein. He called Trump a “loser” in the same all-caps voice Trump uses against his own opponents. The act has long since stopped being clever, if it ever was. It has become the entire job.
The State He Was Elected to Govern
While Newsom workshops his impersonation, the actual California he was twice elected to govern is hemorrhaging in slow motion. The state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office now describes a “structural deficit” of $20 billion to $35 billion annually, the kind of fiscal hole that does not get patched by a clever tweet. Spending under Newsom has jumped 72 percent since his first budget in 2019-20, while California’s population has been stagnant at 39.6 million and inflation rose 29 percent over the same span. Revenues have not kept pace with appetite, and now the state is leaning on a presumed AI-stock windfall to paper over the math.
The people are voting with their moving vans. Nearly 1.7 million residents have fled California since 2020. Los Angeles County recorded the largest population drop of any region in the nation between July 2024 and July 2025. A University of California, Berkeley study found that those who leave overwhelmingly land in places where housing costs are roughly $672 less per month and homeownership becomes possible for the first time in their lives. The promised land used to be California. Now California is the place people escape to find one.
And then there is homelessness, the crisis the governor has been promising to fix since he was mayor of San Francisco a generation ago. California holds about ten percent of the country’s population and roughly half of its homeless. At a recent Democratic primary debate to choose his successor, every single Democrat on the stage refused to give Newsom a grade lower than B-minus on the issue.
Republican candidate Steve Hilton was less generous and more accurate. “My goodness, of course it’s an F,” he said. “It shames our state.”
The Tell
A UC Berkeley poll found that 54 percent of California voters believe their governor is doing things designed to benefit a presidential campaign rather than govern the state. Only 26 percent believe he is focused on California’s actual problems. The voters are not stupid. They can see what their governor is doing, and what he is doing is auditioning.
The audition is going badly. Newsom’s disapproval has climbed to 45 percent, his highest in years. In early 2025 polling for the 2028 Democratic primary, he sat in second place. He now polls at a humiliating 5 percent, tied for fifth with Tim Walz and JB Pritzker. Charlie Kirk, after appearing on Newsom’s podcast, observed that the governor “has a shark’s instincts and is hoping that voters will have a goldfish’s memory.” That memory, it turns out, is sharper than anyone in Sacramento expected.
This is the deeper irony of the passport stunt. Newsom’s entire shtick — the all-caps posts, the Trump impersonation, the manufactured feuds — is built on the premise that mockery itself is governance. That if you can land a clever post, the structural deficit takes care of itself. That a parody driver’s license is what voters in Bakersfield and Fresno are crying out for after another year of $5 gasoline, smash-and-grab retail crime, and tents lining the freeway exits.
Scripture has a useful word for this kind of leadership. “Whoso boasteth himself of a false gift is like clouds and wind without rain.” That is California in 2026. A governor full of weather, signifying nothing. A great deal of bluster about how marvelous he is, and not a drop of relief for the people he was elected to serve.
The Distraction Is the Strategy
None of this is accidental. Newsom understands that he cannot run for president on the actual record of California — the deficit, the exodus, the homelessness, the failed high-speed rail, the highest gas prices in the continental United States, the burned-out Pacific Palisades neighborhoods still waiting on permits a year after the January 2025 fires. He cannot win a Democratic primary, much less a general election, by asking Americans to look at California and want more of it.
So instead he asks them to look at Trump. He performs the role of the resistance. He picks fights, generates clips, and hopes the cumulative volume of attention will substitute for accomplishment. The fake driver’s license is not a bug in the strategy. It is the strategy. Pick a meaningless fight, generate a news cycle, and pray that nobody back home has time between rent payments to ask why the governor of the largest state in the union spends his afternoons photoshopping passports.
The voters are noticing anyway. The polls are noticing. Even the Democratic candidates running to replace him are quietly conceding, in their B-minus grades and their carefully hedged compliments, that the Newsom era has not been the triumph he insists it was. The Trump obsession is no longer concealing the failure. It has become the most visible evidence of it.
A man who cannot govern his state has decided to spend his final years in office trolling the man who can govern a country. The contrast writes itself, and California’s voters, finally, are reading it.
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