Rapper Nicki Minaj accused Newsom of trying to appeal to black voters by telling "them how stupid he is and that he can't read." Republican Senator Tim Scott was more direct, telling Newsom that "black Americans aren't your low bar" and calling the performance "patronizing."
Gavin Newsom stood on a stage in Georgia last weekend, in conversation with Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, and delivered a line that deserves to be preserved in the museum of political delusion.
"I'm not trying to impress you. I'm just trying to impress upon you, 'I'm like you.' I'm no better than you. I'm a 960 SAT guy."
He kept going. He told the audience he's never read a speech because he can't read a speech, then added, with what was presumably meant as self-deprecating charm, that he might be in the wrong business.
The crowd was mostly black. The backlash was immediate.
But the SAT pandering was only the surface problem. The deeper issue is the memoir Newsom released this week, and the elaborate mythology it constructs around a man whose life story is, by any honest measure, one of extraordinary privilege.
As reported by the Daily Mail, Newsom's book leans hard into a narrative of hardship. His mother, Tessa, worked three jobs: bookkeeper, assistant retail buyer, waitress at a Mexican restaurant, and real estate agent. She rented out rooms and took in foster children to help cover rent. The family moved five times in a decade. His parents divorced when he was two. He writes about dyslexia, about struggling to read, about faking stomach aches in the nurse's office, and biting down on thermometers to push the temperature past 100.
None of that is necessarily untrue. What's missing is everything else.
Newsom's father, William Newsom III, was an appellate judge, an attorney, a former Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeals, and a pillar of San Francisco society. He described his family as a "clan of 46 attorneys." He was a close confidant of the oil billionaire Getty family. He managed their $4 billion trust. He was involved in delivering the ransom money to the kidnappers of J. Paul Getty's grandson.
Gordon Getty, son of the oil tycoon, called William Newsom his "best, best friend." Gordon Getty once took the young Gavin Newsom to meet the King of Spain on the private family jet, known as "Jetty."
Jack Nicholson thought Newsom was one of the "Getty boys."
This is the man now telling audiences in Georgia that he's just like them.
The memoir is a carefully curated exercise in selective memory, but photographs are stubborn things. They don't adjust their framing to suit a 2028 presidential campaign.
Consider what the record shows:
Tim Young of the conservative Heritage Foundation saw the "Children of the Rich" photograph and offered the only appropriate response: "Life is hard when you're super wealthy."
Newsom's cousins are the nieces and nephews of Nancy Pelosi. Former Governor Jerry Brown, a family friend, wrote his letter of recommendation to Santa Clara University. Newsom doesn't include that detail in his book.
Funny how the omissions all run in one direction.
Newsom is aware of the contradiction. He has to be. In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, he insisted he wasn't fabricating a bootstrap story: "I'm not trying to be something I'm not."
He added that he wasn't trying to say he "was born in a town called Hope with no running water," but that the book offers "a very different portrayal than the one I think nine out of ten people believe."
There's a reason nine out of ten people believe what they believe. The evidence supports it. The magazine spreads, the Getty jet, the mansion wedding, the family trust, the appellate judge father, and the winery funded by oil money. These aren't smears. They're his biography.
Newsom himself, in the memoir, acknowledges the tension. He recounts that his mother warned him that "entry into the Getty world would rob me of my own hard-earned story." He writes about coming home from trips with the Gettys to find his mother giving him the silent treatment:
"Our mother didn't know what to do with the memories we carted home from our Getty trips. It was almost as if we were strangers to her. For a day or two, she'd give us the silent treatment and then we'd fall back into the form of a life trying to make ends meet."
The passage is revealing, but not in the way Newsom intends. He frames the Getty access as a burden, a source of domestic friction, something that complicates his identity. The simpler reading is that he lived in two worlds and is now pretending only one of them existed.
The article notes that this kind of political reinvention has a long American lineage. Abraham Lincoln told voters in the 1860 election how he had risen from a one-room log cabin. Politicians have always understood that struggle sells.
But there's a difference between a man who actually split rails and a man who flew on "Jetty" to meet European royalty. The populist costume requires at least a passing resemblance to the populace. Newsom's version requires you to ignore every photograph, every public record, and every social register entry from the first four decades of his life.
He wrote in his memoir that the "one-dimensional portrait of me p***ed me off because I knew the way I grew up, the struggles my mother had to endure, the hard times that made my life a duality that never seemed to get its due."
His mother did struggle. That's real. But Newsom didn't just grow up in her world. He grew up in the Getty world simultaneously, and that world handed him a winery, a fortune, and a political career before he turned thirty.
Everything about this tour, the memoir, the Georgia appearance, the studied humility about SAT scores, is a 2028 presidential campaign in soft launch. Newsom is trying to solve the only problem that has ever stood between him and a viable national candidacy: he looks, sounds, and lives like exactly what he is.
California Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton, who knows the Newsom operation up close, didn't mince words:
"It's an elite bubble he's been in and it's a pathetic attempt to pander to people. I think it's going to turn people off massively."
Newsom's office did not respond to an interview request from the Daily Mail.
The silence is understandable. The photographs speak loudly enough.