Gavin Newsom stood on a stage in Georgia last weekend, in conversation with Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, and delivered a line he clearly thought would land as humble.
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 couldn't read a speech and was maybe "in the wrong business." The California governor, fresh off the release of a new memoir, wanted the crowd to see a man who scraped and struggled his way to the top.
The problem is the photographs. And the family connections. And the private jets. And the oil billionaires.
Newsom's memoir leans hard into his childhood dyslexia and his mother's financial difficulties after divorcing his father. The story is real enough on its surface. His mother, Tessa, married William Newsom III when she was 19 and he was 32. After the split, she worked as a bookkeeper, an assistant retail buyer, a waitress at a Mexican restaurant, and a real estate agent. The family moved five times in a decade. She rented out rooms and took in foster children.
Newsom writes about all of this with evident feeling, the Daily Mail reported. He describes biting down on the thermometer in the nurse's office, trying to push the reading past 100 so he could ditch class. He spoke about it in his 2023 inaugural address. The dyslexia is not in dispute.
What is in dispute is whether any of this makes Gavin Newsom "just like you."
William Newsom III was an appellate judge, an attorney, and a close confidant to the oil billionaire Getty family. He described the Newsoms as a "clan of 46 attorneys." He was involved in delivering the ransom money to the kidnappers of J. Paul Getty's grandson. He managed the family's $4 billion trust.
Gordon Getty called the elder Newsom his "best, best friend."
Young Gavin and his sister, Hillary, didn't just know the Gettys. They traveled with them. Gordon Getty once took the young Newsom to meet the King of Spain on a private family jet known as "Jetty." Jack Nicholson reportedly thought Newsom was one of the "Getty boys." At 24, Newsom appeared in a San Francisco magazine photo spread alongside Andrew and Billy Getty under the headline "Children of the Rich."
When the Getty family composed an opera called "PlumpJack" in the 1980s, the name would later become the brand for Newsom's business ventures. The Getty family invested in those ventures.
His wedding reception to Kimberly Guilfoyle was held at the Getty mansion. The couple posed there for Vogue on an Oriental rug.
His cousins were the nieces and nephews of Nancy Pelosi. The family was close with the Browns, which produced California governors Pat Brown and his son Jerry Brown. Jerry Brown wrote Newsom a letter of recommendation to Santa Clara University, a detail Newsom's book does not include.
Tim Young of the Heritage Foundation looked at the photograph from that "Children of the Rich" spread and offered the only appropriate response: "Life is hard when you're super wealthy."
There is a long tradition in American politics of candidates softening their backgrounds. In the 1860 election, Abraham Lincoln told how he had risen from a one-room log cabin. The difference is that Lincoln actually lived in a one-room log cabin.
Newsom's approach is stranger. He acknowledges the privilege in his memoir but treats it as a burden, something that obscured his real suffering. He writes that his mother warned him that "entry into the Getty world would rob me of my own hard-earned story." He describes the tension of coming home from Getty trips to a mother who gave them the silent treatment before the family fell "back into the form of a life trying to make ends meet."
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Newsom insisted he wasn't fabricating hardship:
I'm not trying to be something I'm not.
He added that the book offers "a very different portrayal than the one I think nine out of ten people believe." He's right about that. The portrayal is different. Whether it's more honest is another question entirely.
The backlash to Newsom's Georgia appearance was swift and bipartisan in its contempt. Rapper Nicki Minaj accused him of trying to appeal to black voters by telling "them how stupid he is and that he can't read." Sen. Tim Scott told Newsom that "black Americans aren't your low bar" and called the performance "patronizing."
The critics are right to be offended. Newsom walked onto a stage in a majority-black city and bragged about his low SAT score and inability to read speeches. The implication, whether Newsom intended it or not, was unmistakable: I'm dumbing myself down so you'll relate to me.
This is what happens when a man who rode private jets with oil billionaires, launched businesses with Getty money, married into political royalty, and attended a school in Marin County tries to build a political identity around struggle. The mask doesn't just slip. It shatters on contact with reality.
Newsom's book reveals a man who spent his life trying on identities. He writes that he remodeled himself on Remington Steele, the TV detective character played by Pierce Brosnan in the 1980s. He copied Sylvester Stallone in Rocky by drinking raw eggs and running. He mimicked Tony Robbins, the TV life coach. He turned a $20 busboy tip into a narrative about grit.
Steve Hilton, the California Republican gubernatorial candidate, captured the core problem plainly:
It's so gross. 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.
None of this would matter if Newsom were simply a wealthy man running for higher office. Wealth is not disqualifying in American politics. The proudly wealthy Donald Trump proved that decisively. Voters don't resent success. They resent being lied to about it.
Newsom's sin is not that he grew up adjacent to extraordinary privilege. It's that he's built an entire political persona around pretending he didn't. The memoir, the Georgia performance, the carefully deployed SAT score: all of it is designed to manufacture an origin story that the facts cannot support.
He writes in the book 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."
Duality. That's the word he chose. The man who met the King of Spain on a private jet wants credit for also having a mother who waited tables. And he does deserve that credit, in the narrow biographical sense. Both things happened.
But only one of those things opened the doors that made him governor of California. Only one of those things funded his first business. Only one of those things placed him in magazine spreads as a child of the rich.
Voters can smell inauthenticity, and a 2028 campaign built on this foundation will carry the scent a long way.