BEYOND THE DISTRACTIONS: Gavin Newsom Takes Aim at Wealth, Power and “The Grift"
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California governor turns Republican attacks on his state into an argument about affordability, concentrated wealth, Trump and what Democrats say is really at stake in 2026.
By Javar Juarez | CUBNSC | September 4, 2026
SUMMERVILLE, S.C. — Republicans were outside holding signs with what appeared to be the state of California covered in poop.
Inside, California Governor Gavin Newsom was making a much more serious argument.
For nearly two hours Thursday evening, Democrats waited for Newsom to arrive in Summerville for the final stop of a daylong swing through the region.
Traffic through the Low country had slowed the governor's arrival considerably, but the room remained full.
The protesters remained outside.
Their message was straightforward: Go home, Gavin.
Republican gubernatorial candidate and current South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson had already delivered essentially the same message on social media a day earlier.
“Governor Gavin Newsom is coming to South Carolina this week to campaign for my Democrat opponent and audition for President,” Wilson wrote. “Higher costs. Bigger government. Failed liberal policies. California can keep it.”
He ended with: “Don’t California My South Carolina.”
It was predictable political theater.
Then Newsom finally showed up.
We Came Ready to Talk About California
There are legitimate criticisms to make about California.
California may have one of the largest economies on Earth, but that does not mean everyone living there is prospering.
Housing affordability remains a serious problem, the cost of living is high, and the state continues to wrestle with an enormous divide between extraordinary wealth and people struggling to survive.
California's economy reached roughly $4.25 trillion in 2025 after reaching $4.1 trillion the previous year, when it surpassed Japan. California officials have described it as the world's fourth-largest economy. Governor of California
So when Republicans describe California simply as a failed state, there is an obvious problem with the argument.
A failed economy does not produce more than $4 trillion in annual economic output.
But a $4 trillion economy does not automatically mean an affordable one either.
Newsom's answer Thursday was essentially: look at the entire picture.
When asked about affordability, Newsome immediately identified two things he said he has been hearing from voters across the country:
“Affordability and fight.”
People, Newsom said, want leaders willing to fight to “lower costs and increase their wages.”
He then rattled through California policies: state-produced insulin, expanded preschool, child savings accounts, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, subsidized child care, universal school meals and expanded health coverage.
Whether South Carolinians want California's policy prescriptions is a legitimate political question.
Newsom's larger challenge to Republicans was different.
What are you offering instead?
“They Want You to Be Distracted”
This may have been the most important part of Newsom's visit.
The governor argued that much of modern conservative politics is built around keeping voters emotionally occupied by cultural fights while much larger economic changes happen around them.
“This is what the Republican Party wants us to talk about,” Newsom said.
He called it “manufactured anxiety, manufactured crisis” and a political “sideshow.”
Then he said what he believes the real story is:
“The real story is concentration of wealth, concentration of power, the grift, the crony capitalism, state capitalism.”
“They want you to be distracted by these fights,” he continued.
That argument landed differently in South Carolina.
Because affordability is not some California abstraction.
South Carolinians are dealing with their own housing pressures, rent increases, insurance costs, utility bills and the consequences of extraordinary population and industrial growth.
The state's political leadership has simultaneously spent years competing for large corporate investments through incentives and public expenditures while selling South Carolina as a low-tax, low-cost place to do business.
That raises a question worth asking regardless of political party:
Low cost for whom?
Newsom Doesn't Pretend Democrats Are Innocent
Something else was striking.
Newsom did not absolve his own party.
Talking about an economy in which working people increasingly struggle to accumulate wealth, purchase homes and absorb emergencies, he described life for many Americans in brutally simple terms:
“Two paychecks and a GoFundMe page.”
Then he said:
“Democrats need to own that as well.”
Newsom argued that the economic problems predate Trump's return to power and represent a decades-long trajectory.
“We cannot sit there and defend capitalism as we know it today,” he said. “It's not working for enough people.”
That is a substantially different argument than simply telling voters Republicans are bad.
And it helps explain why Newsom believes Democrats should be talking less about whatever controversy is dominating cable television on a particular night and more about wages, housing, health care and household expenses.
The Billionaire Tax Gets Complicated
There was another California issue we specifically wanted to put before the governor: Proposition 40.
The proposed ballot measure would impose a one-time 5 percent tax on certain California residents with assets exceeding $1 billion.
Ninety percent of the proceeds would be directed toward health care, with the remainder going toward education, food assistance and administration.
California's nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office estimates the measure could temporarily raise tens of billions of dollars, while potentially reducing future annual income-tax revenue by less than $1 billion if wealthy taxpayers alter their behavior or leave the state.
The politics are messy.
The California Democratic Party endorsed Proposition 40, while the San Francisco Democratic Party voted 17-4 against it. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi declined to endorse the proposal. Fortune
And Newsom opposes it.
That surprised some people who may assume that the governor of California automatically occupies the furthest-left position available.
He doesn't.
Newsom told us that California should tax wealthy people progressively but called this particular initiative “not a well-written initiative.”
“At the federal level, we need to tax billionaires more,” he said. “We need a progressive tax system.”
But he argued Proposition 40 is the wrong mechanism and could encourage wealthy taxpayers to relocate.
You can believe billionaires should pay more in taxes and still disagree over how the government should tax them.
Then Newsom Started Talking About Trump
This is where the evening became considerably darker.
Newsom told the audience about conversations he says he has personally had with President Donald Trump.
One involved a phone call concerning Los Angeles.
According to Newsom, Trump began the conversation not with what was happening in Los Angeles, but by insisting that he had defeated Kamala Harris in a presidential debate.
Newsom said Trump complained the debate had been “four against one.”
Newsom initially thought Trump meant Harris and the debate moderators.
According to Newsom, Trump counted the cameraman as the fourth person.
“Swear to you, this was a conversation,” Newsom told the crowd.
The room laughed.
But Newsom wasn't really telling a joke.
He was describing behavior by the sitting president of the United States that he found alarming.
And then came the Oval Office story.
“Who Knew It Wasn't a Coin?”
Newsom said he met Trump in the Oval Office after the Los Angeles fires seeking federal assistance, arriving with an “open hand” and “open heart.”
Then, during what Newsom described as a 90-minute meeting, the conversation unexpectedly turned to Trump's cryptocurrency venture.
“Who knew it wasn't a coin?”
Newsom recalled Trump saying before telling him about roughly $600 million connected to the venture.
The numbers Newsom cited are backed up by financial reports.
Trump's 2025 financial disclosure shows he made about $636 million through CIC Digital, most of it connected to the $TRUMP meme coin.
At the same time, blockchain research firm Nansen found that nearly one million wallets that bought the coin had lost or were down a combined $3.81 billion by the end of June 2026.
For Newsom, the story was about more than cryptocurrency.
He offered the Oval Office encounter as another example of what he had been arguing all evening: concentration of wealth, concentration of power and distraction.
And it raised the more sobering question Newsom wanted the room to consider: what does the president's behavior behind closed doors reveal about his judgment and focus?
From Meme Coins to Tariffs
Newsom didn't stop there.
He used Trump's cryptocurrency ventures, his family's international business interests and U.S. tariff policy to build a broader argument: that Americans are being inundated with political noise while conflicts involving public policy and private wealth receive far less attention.
Newsom specifically alleged connections between tariff negotiations involving Vietnam and business activity involving Eric Trump, and separately raised questions about World Liberty Financial and business involving the United Arab Emirates.
But Newsom's rhetorical point was unmistakable.
He described the political strategy in four words:
“Distraction, exhaustion, smash and grab.”
And suddenly the protesters outside holding poop-covered California signs became part of the story in a way they probably did not intend.
Republicans Came to Protest California. Newsom Came to Talk About South Carolina.
Newsom's answer to conservatives who argue his “West Coast policies” could never work in South Carolina was surprisingly uncomplicated.
He argued conservative voters want higher wages too.
They want affordable health care.
They want child care that allows them to go to work.
And he pushed back against the caricature of California as nothing more than Hollywood, Silicon Valley and progressive urban politics.
California, he reminded the room, is also a massive agricultural, manufacturing and rural state. He continued:
“Everyone says California, West Coast. They don't understand Ag. It's literally part of our DNA.”
He dismissed what he called “California derangement” and said the economic “receipts” tell a considerably more complicated story.
California is neither the progressive paradise its defenders sometimes portray nor the economic wasteland its conservative critics describe.
It is a complicated state with enormous wealth, enormous production and enormous affordability problems.
Sounds familiar.
South Carolina Has Its Own Affordability Conversation
That is ultimately why Wilson's “Don't California My South Carolina” message deserves scrutiny rather than dismissal or applause.
South Carolina doesn't need to become California to have an affordability problem.
We already have one.
And South Carolina doesn't need California's tax system, regulatory structure or political culture to ask whether our own economic development strategy is producing enough benefit for the people already living here.
Those are South Carolina questions.
Newsom simply walked into the state and forced them onto the table.
Democrats Are Betting on the State House
Newsom's appearance was organized as Democrats make an unusually broad play for the South Carolina House in the 2026 midterms.
South Carolina's Senate is not on the ballot until 2028, making the 124-member House the immediate legislative battlefield.
The event featured Democratic candidates Sonja Ogletree Santini, running for House District 98, and Montez Aiken, running for House District 102. Preston Smelt, a candidate for Dorchester County Council District 7, was also present, along with Democratic nominee for state treasurer Vincent Coe.
South Carolina Democratic Party Executive Director Jay Parmley reminded the crowd that Election Day was 60 days away and pleaded for volunteers to help turn out voters up and down the ballot.
Dorchester County Democratic Party Chair Alexia Niketas told attendees that Democrats still had plenty of work to do before early voting in local communities.
Then she delivered one of the afternoon's better political jabs:
“Has anyone checked on Alan Wilson?”
The crowd erupted.
Javar Juarez is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Urban Broadcast Network (CUBN), an independent investigative news outlet based in Columbia, South Carolina, and a member of the South Carolina Press Association. He is also President of the Capital City Chapter of the A. Philip Randolph Institute.
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