The Wannabe Leftist Trump: How Gavin Newsom Is Playing the Persecution Card

Gavin Newsom would have you believe he is now the brave victim of a Trump-orchestrated reign of terror. In a self-pitying video released this week, the California governor melodramatically declared that he and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, had proudly joined “Donald Trump’s hit list.”

Federal agents, he wailed, have been knocking on doors of family, friends, and former employees. Grand juries are being “abused.” Investigators are digging through years of documents—not because they found crimes, he insists, but because they are simply trying to manufacture them. According to Newsom, the entire effort is raw political revenge for his repeated criticisms of Trump and his rumored interest in running for president in 2028.

This is Newsom’s calculated bid to become the Left’s Trump. He frames every legal pressure as a witch hunt, turns routine scrutiny into a badge of honor, and positions himself as the defiant champion who will lead the resistance. 

He hopes the “hit list” rhetoric, paired with the suggestion that Trump fears him as a genuine threat, will rally the progressive base, attract big donors, energize activists, and finally make him the Democratic Party’s Trump-like figure—resilient, victimized, and destined for the White House.

It won’t work. The parallels are hollow. Trump endured four criminal indictments, two impeachments, an FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, a public mugshot, gag orders, and novel legal theories pushed in hostile courts. His supporters rightly called it lawfare—the weaponization of justice by a politicized system.

Newsom faces nothing comparable. There have been no SWAT raids on his mansion, no agents rifling through wife’s underwear drawer, and no Alvin Bragg-style press conferences inventing felonies from misdemeanors with ever-shifting “other crimes.” 

Newsom and his wife have not even been personally subpoenaed. Instead, federal investigators have interviewed associates and issued routine subpoenas to banks and financial institutions for records linked to nonprofits and businesses tied to the Newsoms. 

These are standard tools that Newsom and his allies long cheered when used against conservatives. Yet, he casts these inquiries as a Trump-driven “reign of terror.” Newsom is frantically searching for any angle to paint a legitimate investigation as false persecution.

The hypocrisy is incredible. For years, Newsom praised every aggressive legal move against Trump—creative charges, friendly venues, and process as punishment. “No one is above the law,” he declared repeatedly. Now that career prosecutors in the Eastern District of California, following leads that began under the Biden administration, are reviewing patterns in his own circle, it suddenly becomes a fascist plot driven by Trump’s personal dread. This is the classic double standard: justice for thee, but tyranny for me.

The questions under review are real and long predate any Trump return. Newsom’s former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, pleaded guilty in May 2026 to conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, false statements, and related counts after allegedly diverting roughly $225,000 from a dormant campaign fund tied to former Biden health secretary Xavier Becerra. Wiretaps and evidence gathering started years earlier.

Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s nonprofit, The Representation Project, raises even more serious concerns. IRS filings show she and her production company, Girls Club Entertainment LLC, have pulled in roughly $3.7 million combined over more than a decade—including her $150,000 annual salary plus licensing and production fees for her own films. 

These payments consume an outsized share of the organization’s modest budget, while donations flowed from entities with business before the state. Longstanding Sacramento questions about self-dealing and pay-to-play optics triggered reviews well before any supposed vendetta.

Then there is Newsom’s predictable counterattack. When federal agents appeared near one of his events last year in Los Angeles, he immediately filed Freedom of Information Act requests framing routine law enforcement presence as intimidation by Trump’s “personal police force.” On the very same day he released his victimhood video, his office demanded more records from the Justice Department. 

He weaponizes transparency demands against others while shielding his state’s books on pandemic fraud, homelessness spending, and nonprofit dealings. All of it is designed to manufacture a narrative of victimhood rather than confront the actual questions being asked.

California’s well-known history with fraud makes the entire martyr act impossible to take seriously. An estimated $20 billion in Employment Development Department pandemic unemployment fraud vanished to criminals and overseas scammers while legitimate claimants suffered. Billions poured into homelessness programs have produced proliferating tent cities, open drug use, street filth, and declining public order. 

Businesses and middle-class residents continue fleeing the state in droves, shrinking the tax base and accelerating decline. This is the governance record of a career machine politician who lectures the nation on morality while insulating his inner circle from scrutiny.

All of this exposes why Newsom’s comparison to Trump is hollow. Trump rose as an outsider who built a genuine grassroots movement against a hostile establishment. Newsom is the ultimate insider—a product of elite California whose leadership has delivered high taxes, failing schools, urban decay, and mass exodus. Claims that Trump “fears” his influence only highlight the vast gap between the two men.

If the probes ultimately clear the Newsoms, full transparency will vindicate them. But the desperate spin, selective amnesia, and emperor’s-new-clothes denial only deepen the humiliation. 

History will record the fraud—and dismiss the performance as the transparent ploy of a man who expected exemption from the standards he demanded for everyone else.

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