Gavin Newsom as the Adult in the Room.
Let's not talk about "how this plays" as politics. Let's think about the way leaders address the public when the stakes are high and the outcome is unknown. We saw this week how it should be done.
California governor Gavin Newsom at the end of his brief address on Tuesday night. His closing words were: ‘What Donald Trump wants most is your fealty. Your silence. To be complicit in this moment. Do NOT give in to him.’ This is how Newsom looked as he delivered that last sentence, just before the screen cut to black. (Screenshot from official CalGov site.)
Two days ago, while we were in California, I happened to see governor Gavin Newsom’s brief statement on the troops-in-LA situation, as it came onto live TV.
As I watched and listened, I thought the speech was remarkable. (And I posted to that effect, on Bluesky.) Yesterday, on the flight back to the East Coast, I listened again to the presentation, and carefully read the official text. This is a speech to be studied, and learned from — and this post is about some reasons why.
And to get one point out of the way: I’m intentionally not talking about how Newsom is “positioned” with this or that voting bloc. Or “messaging” or “how will it play?” in any form. Or odds for the 2028 Democratic ticket. We’re flooded with thoughts on all of that. I’m talking about a striking moment in rhetoric, and in leadership.
Real-time, high-stakes, breaking-news presentations.
Newsom’s speech fits into a special category of public address. These are the high-stakes, real-time, breaking-news presentations, while something big is happening and no one can be sure what will happen next. They demonstrate a leader’s ability to cope with a moment of fear or uncertainty, and to meet the emotional, intellectual, and moral requirements of the public at just that time.1
For example:
-In 1941, Franklin Roosevelt gave his six-minute-long “Date which will live in infamy” address to Congress barely 24 hours after the Pearl Harbor attacks.
-In 1968, Robert F. Kennedy Sr. heard news of Martin Luther King’s assassination while Kennedy was on the campaign trail. Roughly two hours later, at night, unscripted, before an outdoor crowd in Indianapolis, Kennedy gave a five-minute eulogy that quoted Aeschylus and—with its reflection on hatred and political violence—is chilling to watch all these years later.
-In 1986, just before noon, the space shuttle Challenger exploded and killed all aboard. At 5pm Ronald Reagan spoke live from the Oval Office, and gave his moving four-minute tribute.
-In 2001, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani spent the afternoon of September 11 walking through his devastated city, and saying in brief comments what the people of New York, the United States, and the world needed to hear. (Hard to believe now, but true.)
The stakes and circumstances in these cases obviously differ—among each other, and from Newsom this week. What connected the responses was fitness for the moment. Each involved a person in the spotlight, who found the clarity, the tone, the brevity to speak simultaneously to heart and mind, in a kind of terse poetry.
We saw that from Newsom this week.
A speech that was like a talk.
I have no idea how Franklin Roosevelt sounded in “normal” conversation. But the genius of his Depression-era “Fireside Chats” was his presenting them as if he were talking normally, over the radio, with a diverse American audience he addressed as “My friends.”
I do know how Gavin Newsom sounds normally. I’ve met him and interviewed him. People who haven’t done that have seen plenty of him on TV—for instance, a dramatic interview with Jacob Soboroff on MSNBC, one night before his speech.
The point of this comparison is that Newsom gave perhaps his most important “speech” as if he were just having a talk. The cadence, the word choice, the half-sentences, the absence of formal, oratorical padding (“And so I say to you.”) or the slightest hint of “I know better than you”—it all conveyed an informality that, to me, made it seem both more on-the-scene authentic and more urgent.2
Or that is how it sounded to me — and as I’ll mention in the annotated text that follows. You can see the whole (brief) speech, below, and judge for yourself:
Among other traits I noticed:
—The speech had zero fat in it. Newsom didn’t waste time on setup, “transitions,” big finish, or the other usual packaging.
—The staging itself was surprisingly minimalist. Newsom had two flags behind him—Stars and Stripes on one side, the California state Bear Flag on the other. But he wasn’t positioned behind an imposing desk or battleship-type lectern; the camera showed him only from mid-torso up; and he carried himself almost as if he were doing a live-hit for TV reporters.
—Considered just as writing, the speech was amazingly simple sentence by sentence. The rhetorical counterpart of Shaker furniture, or of a spare Japanese tatami room. The official transcript, which I’ll cite below, was broken into very short paragraphs, most just one sentence long. Indeed, many of its sentences were just phrases, rather than fleshed-out or finished-off sentences. Like this.
You see that in the text. What I heard was a man talking, and wanting to get an important point across.
Let’s go to the text.
To compare with what you’ve seen on video, here’s the official text as released by the governor’s office. I have highlighted some phrases in itals and added comments [in bold]. The few ALL CAPS words are from the original release.