Gavin Newsom went fly-fishing with Jake Tapper and came out of the Montana water calling California’s beach closures “insane.”
The California governor (D-CA), long associated with defending the state’s coronavirus restrictions, used the unusual CNN river interview to revisit the outdoor limits, classroom shutdowns and upscale restaurant dinner that still follow his pandemic record.
The beach admission came after Tapper mentioned people cleaning groceries during the early panic, prompting Newsom to point back at shutdown choices that kept their political bite.
“Yeah! I mean, [Republican Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis was closing down his beaches before we closed ours. The idea that we closed beaches was insane. In hindsight,” Newsom said.
Newsom put the long school closures in the same regret column, saying some districts had reopened while the largest ones lagged.
“Obviously the schools taking too long,” he said. “A lot of districts were open, but the big ones weren’t. L.A. refused. And I regret that, obviously.”
Tapper also forced Newsom back to the restaurant dinner that damaged his credibility during the period when he was asking Californians to live under public restrictions.
Newsom described the dinner as exhaustion, bad judgment and a personal failure rather than something he still wanted to defend.
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“Just a boneheaded decision, a stupid decision, I just … dialing it in, we were exhausted, friend’s birthday, it was a restaurant that was open the night before,” Newsom admitted.
The governor acknowledged that the dinner clashed with the standards he was urging the public to follow.
“And it was just against the spirit of the rules that I was promoting,” Newsom said. “It was completely legit condemnation.”
Newsom claimed that he wore a mask going into the restaurant and again when he left.
Before Newsom got to the specific regrets, Tapper had argued that the country still needed a pandemic commission to separate successful responses from failed ones.
Newsom initially gave a guarded answer. “Yeah, look, everyone’s a genius in hindsight, so, you know, coulda woulda,” Newsom conceded.
His earliest example was hand sanitizer, with Newsom saying his book included “a whole chapter just about Purell.”
He recalled officials “running around doing price-gouging legislation against Purell” while the public still had a mistaken sense of what kind of crisis they were facing.
“Everyone was thinking it was a Purell-based crisis,” Newsom said.
The same fly-fishing interview also put Newsom on the spot over 2028, especially the prospect of facing Kamala Harris in a Democratic presidential primary.
Newsom told Tapper he would not challenge Harris, the former vice president and former U.S. senator from California, if she ran.
“Of course not. Why would I?” Newsom questioned. “I wouldn’t do that to her. I wouldn’t do it to me. Why would I? I wouldn’t do that to you. I wouldn’t waste everyone’s time. Who needs that?”
Pressed on the fact that he could still enter the race, Newsom said a matchup with Harris would hand “a gift from God” to everyone else and become “mutually assured destruction.”
“I know her base of supporters. I know her friends,” Newsom added.
His attempt to describe the overlap produced one of the interview’s stranger phrases.
“The zen diagram on that is just pure crossover,” Newsom said, appearing to mean a Venn diagram.
Newsom added that a White House campaign would be a “non-starter” without support from his four children.
Harris, while leaving her own 2028 answer open, is set to appear in Michigan with Abdul El-Sayed (D-MI), the Democratic Senate nominee, according to his campaign.
The two are scheduled for a Black maternal health roundtable next Tuesday, following Harris’ endorsement of El-Sayed last month.
In that endorsement, Harris tied El-Sayed’s campaign to affordability and Democratic control of the Senate.
“Dr. Abdul El-Sayed understands the power is with the people, and that the stakes couldn’t be higher in this election,” Harris wrote.
She said Michiganders were struggling with housing, gas, groceries, health care and child care while “Trump and Republicans in Congress are giving away $1 trillion in tax breaks to the wealthy and powerful.”
“Abdul knows that we need bold solutions to the crises facing America’s working families and he is ready to take on this fight,” Harris wrote. “I proudly stand with him to ensure we win a Democratic Senate majority in Nov.”
El-Sayed told Politico on Wednesday that Harris would be coming to Michigan for conversations about turnout.
“I’m just really looking forward to having her here, and she is somebody who so many folks in communities like Detroit look up to as an inspirational leader,” El-Sayed told the outlet.
“I’m grateful that she’s coming in and having conversations about what it takes to get the turnout up, so that we can get on to working on some of these issues in the U.S. Senate,” he added.
Harris also told former women’s soccer star Megan Rapinoe on the podcast “What Are You Like?” that the midterms were consuming her attention and work.
“[Midterms], midterms, midterms, full-time occupying my thoughts, my mind and my work,” Harris stated.
She accused Republicans of “cheating” through redistricting and voting changes.
“We have to win these midterms. These — these folks are cheating. They’re redrawing lines. They’re trying to make it more difficult for people to vote so they won’t vote because they are afraid of the power of the people,” Harris claimed.
Harris told Rapinoe she was working to help Democrats win back Congress “so that we can stop the madness.”
When Rapinoe asked what brought her back into politics and public life, Harris framed service as something she could not separate from herself.
“I don’t know how to live and not serve,” Harris said. “I honestly don’t. I just don’t. It’s something I’ve come to terms with. I don’t know how to, I just don’t know a life without figuring out how I can help move the needle.”
Harris said she wanted to restore “some sense of sanity” and a functioning government, but she did not give a final answer on 2028.
“I haven’t decided,” Harris said. “From my perspective, ’28 doesn’t matter if we don’t win ’26.”
