The uber-conservative Thomas Massie is a rare outlier in a conference
that tends to capitulate before the threat of a Trump-backed primary. After all, most Trump antagonists within the party, like Liz Cheney, have fallen decisively to his anointed primary challengers. Massie, however, has survived three primaries from the right already, which seems to have only emboldened him.

When Trump attacked Massie online for vowing to oppose
the president’s preferred six-month spending stopgap—which passed this evening with the support of every Republican except Massie—the Kentucky congressman responded with the social-media equivalent of a shrug. Trump’s all-caps missive calling him a “GRANDSTANDER” who “SHOULD BE PRIMARIED” should have been familiar: Back in 2020, after Massie opposed the Trump-backed pandemic-aid CARES act, the current president actually
called him a “third-rate” grandstander. Nevertheless, Massie went on to beat his challenger easily. (A few months later, go figure, Trump was calling him a “first-rate defender of the
constitution.”) Anyway, emboldened by his ability to overcome past skirmishes, Massie appears to really be digging in this time around. “POTUS is spending his day attacking me and Canada,” he posted on X. “The difference is Canada will eventually cave.” 

Tonight’s vote marks the
third time Massie has cast the lone G.O.P. “no” votes against Trump priorities during this Congress: He also voted against reinstalling Mike Johnson as House speaker, and against passing the House Republican budget resolution. This time, Trump and Johnson actually prevailed more comfortably than in the first two instances, 217-213, including a “yes” from Trump-district Maine Democrat Jared Golden. But given these margins, Massie has no doubt put pressure on
Trump’s whipping strategy. 

Since going after Massie in 2020, Trump has consolidated his hold on the G.O.P., so perhaps the president will win this round. Still, a cursory glance at Massie’s end-of-year campaign finance report demonstrated that he’s got a modernized operation and starts with an impressive $900,000 in cash on hand, which may be the real reason, as Massie also
posted, that threatening his reelection “doesn’t work on me.”

The most revelatory angle to the Democratic freak-out over Gavin
Newsom’s disclosure that it’s “deeply unfair” for trans athletes to play girl’s sports was that there was hardly any Democratic freak-out at all. Yes, there was disgust from trans advocates and LGBTQ groups, like the Human Rights Campaign, which said that Newsom was “betraying” vulnerable communities with a cynical eye on the White House in 2028. And yes, there were appalled progressives in Sacramento, where Newsom still has a year or so of being governor. Scott Wiener,
an ambitious Bay Area state senator, issued a 400-word statement blasting Newsom for hosting conservative talker Charlie Kirk as the first guest on his new podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom, where he uttered the remark. And there were some Democratic critics outside the state too, like former Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, who said, “There are kids waking up today in California with this news thinking that their governor hates them, and rightly so.”

But the reality is that political reporters had to dig pretty damn deep in their rolodexes to locate prominent Democrats willing to speak out against Newsom. (Lightfoot, for instance, is the definition of a former—she finished a dismal third in her reelection campaign.) In truth, the party’s response to Newsom on the trans story, in Washington and elsewhere, was actually pretty tame, a sign that
Democrats know Gav has a point about which way the wind is blowing. 

The big-time Democrats who’ve been asked about Newsom’s podcast have mostly punted, giving statements that Kamala Harris probably should have delivered last fall, when she was being bludgeoned by attack ads calling attention to her past support for taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries, a blitz that blunted her
momentum and drove down her favorable ratings starting in early October. The gist from Dems today? Trans kids are broadly under attack in Donald Trump’s America, but the issue of youth sports should be addressed at the local level, not in Congress or by executive fiat. 

Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, a reliable avatar of swing state thinking, noted on Meet the
Press over that weekend, “I wouldn’t be here without the leadership training I got in women’s sports. But for me, it’s like, let’s let the local community figure this out.” New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen had roughly the same response, saying, “We can police it through the organizations.” Axios reported that Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin, the first openly gay member of the U.S. Senate, organized the messaging push—just as Senate Dems successfully
filibustered a G.O.P.-backed bill to ban federally funded schools from allowing transgender athletes to participate in women’s sports. “Republicans in Washington are saying they know better than parents and local school districts,” Baldwin told Axios. “They are wrong. I trust parents, schools, and local sports leagues to make these decisions for their children.”

All of these comments are a long-overdue
admission from Democrats—at least the ones who have to put their names on a ballot and win elections—that the political battles over trans athletes have put them on their heels. The anti-Harris ads were an obvious proof point, as pretty much every post-election focus group has demonstrated (including the ones I wrote about in February, which featured a
Barack Obama voter in Milwaukee who said Democrats should stand for “low prices, low crime, no sex changes”). But feel free to Google any poll from the last few years, as Republicans began passing state bills banning trans girls and women from youth and college sports: Overwhelming majorities of voters, including a growing number of Democrats, are plainly in Newsom’s camp on the issue. 

Plenty of
Democrats—and plenty of Newsom’s critics in recent days—engage in a nifty bit of misdirection by claiming this is all a fake wedge issue invented by Republicans. Pretending it’s a non-issue is unfair, not only to opponents of trans sports participation, but also to young trans athletes and their families. Progressives frequently cite NCAA president Charlie Baker, who said last year that there are “less than 10” transgender athletes participating in college sports. But this isn’t
just about college sports. The Williams Institute at UCLA Law School estimates that “as many as 122,000 transgender youth could be participating in high school–level team athletics.” That may not be a lot. But it’s not a little either. 

Democrats were emphatically less okay with comments like Newsom’s before last November’s
electoral drubbing, or even in the weeks after. At the time, many strategists and plenty of electeds were speaking out against the loud activists and identity groups that, they claimed, had dragged the party far left, outside the mainstream sensibilities of working-class voters and swingy suburbanites. “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton
told The New York Times just days after the November election. “I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” 

After those comments went live, Moulton faced demonstrations at his office and was pilloried by local LGBTQ activists, plenty of local Democratic officials,
the Massachusetts Democratic Party chairman, and even Gov. Maura Healey, who said Moulton was “playing politics with people.” I called Moulton on Tuesday, four months after he was in the barrel, to get his perspective on Newsom’s comments. Moulton said he was pleased that Democrats mostly weren’t condemning Newsom, and told me it demonstrates that Democrats have the potential at least to have conversations about uncomfortable topics. 

“We are not going to be a majority party if we can’t accept points of view from the majority of Americans,” Moulton told me. “Dems need to get real, and it’s encouraging to see other Democrats do just that. We are making progress, because the backlash, although still bad, is far less than what I saw four months ago.” Moulton also told me that when he got back to Capitol Hill after last November’s election, dozens of Democratic
members thanked him for speaking out—but they felt the need to whisper their compliments so no one would overhear.

But back to my perfectly coiffed governor for a moment. Newsom may or may not run for president—and I think more people should consider the possibility that he may not, and that this podcast journey is just Newsom in late-career D.G.A.F. mode with his party at rock bottom. Whatever he
chooses, this whole episode made for a fascinating test case of what’s to come if Democrats actually follow through on what needs to be done, in format and message, before the 2028 election. Here was Newsom doing precisely what smarty-pants Democrats strategists were calling for in the wake of the November election. Breaking with the left on an unpopular issue? Check. Engaging with voices outside the blue cultural bubble? Check. Experimenting with new media channels
that have become dominated by right-wing voices? Check.

None of it was perfect. Newsom’s loose delivery probably wasn’t ideal—“Right position, wrong everything else,” one plugged-in California Dem told me. He could have more fully explained a larger policy framework or political view on trans youth. If he’s opposed to trans girls and women playing in youth and college sports, then why did he not
speak out on the issue until now? Is he backtracking on all the other trans protections he’s supported in the past? Would he support a trans sports ban, but simultaneously defend trans rights on healthcare, housing discrimination, legal name changes, bathroom access, or anything else? 

If Newsom does want to crack down on trans youth in girls sports, there is literally a Republican bill in
the California Assembly—The Protect Girls’ Sports Act—that he could endorse right now. But of course, he won’t. Maybe Newsom will clarify some of these questions in a future sit-down with a member of the press. But I doubt he’ll do that, either. Despite his smooth-talker reputation, Newsom can be pretty uncomfortable around hungry reporters in unscripted settings. Which is one reason, I suspect, that he’s decided to host his own podcast.

As for his performance, Newsom was probably a little too solicitous of Kirk in his maiden podcasting voyage, playing the role of a glib morning show host and forgetting, perhaps, that he’s first and foremost a Democrat—a leader with a lot of Democratic followers who wanted him to take a scalpel to the cocky Turning Point founder, not get chummy with a patron saint of MAGA. Engaging with a political opponent in a longform, non-hostile format—the stated mission of Newsom’s
podcast—is truly rare in today’s divided media landscape, and it’s honestly refreshing at a time when partisans rarely engage with people outside their ideological cocoons and voters shield themselves from discourse they don’t like. But Newsom, as one seasoned Democratic strategist put it to me, sounded like he was interviewing Kirk for an episode of How I Built This. Media people might be into it, but in the mind’s eye of a progressive, Kirk is still The Enemy. 

Meanwhile, Kirk is not the doofus that many liberals conjure: He came to play. A podcast
host himself, he trucked Newsom in the episode’s first 30 minutes with a burst of facts and arguments about Gen Z and the failures of elite education. If Newsom was cosplaying as a journalist, he forgot to study his note cards. When Kirk jabbed his finger at Newsom and said he “supported Prop 16 that institutionalized racism in California,” Newsom stammered and didn’t bother to push back or explain his thinking on the 2020 ballot measure that brought Affirmative Action back to the state. Also
not working in Newsom’s favor: He has a few characteristic verbal tics—“I love that” or “I totally appreciate that”—that probably make him sound agreeable in a room full of lawmakers or voters, but that don’t work when you’re podcasting with a guy accusing you of reverse racism and managing a socialist dystopia. 

But there are signs of improvement. Newsom dropped Episode 2 on Monday night—an extended
conversation with conservative radio host Michael Savage, himself a longtime California resident. 

You can tell Newsom had received some feedback since his audio debut: He’s more jolly and agreeable with Savage, while also pushing back with more frequency and detail on issues like climate and homelessness than he did with Kirk. Still, given Newsom’s willingness to engage with figures
that progressives have vilified for years, Democrats might not like this episode either—or any of them, ever, for that matter. “Donald Trump and I are getting along right now!” Newsom tells Savage at one point with a laugh. A few minutes later, Newsom asks his guest “what the hell” the Democratic Party needs to do. “Was it because we were too woke? We didn’t focus enough on borders? What was it?”

Controversy or not, it’s clear after Episode 2 that Newsom is going to
keep podcasting through it. He might actually might have a hit on his hands. The debut episode of This Is Gavin Newsom reached as high as No. 4 overall on Apple Podcasts last week, and No. 1 in news over the weekend. Newsom also seems to understand a key MAGA insight about “winning”—attention is everything in the war of ideas, eyeballs, and potential new voters. Both Newsom and Kirk posted the full episode of the podcast on their respective YouTube accounts, and between both channels,
the debut has over 1.3 million views and counting. Adding in view counts from TikTok and YouTube, clips from the first episode of This Is Gavin Newsom now have over 7.2 million combined views. As for what’s next? More MAGA listening sessions. I’ve learned that Newsom recorded a conversation with none other than Steve Bannon on Tuesday, an episode set to go live overnight. 

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