Over the last two weeks, Trump has tested the loyalty of MAGA’s Christian base with a series of extraordinary provocations.
It began on Easter, when Trump threatened to bomb Iran’s power plants and bridges in a profanity-laced Truth Social post, and signed off with “Praise be to Allah.”
Two days later, he warned Iran that “a whole civilization will die tonight” — appalling some of his closest former allies, including Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Candace Owens.
On Sunday night, Trump attacked Pope Leo XIV — the first American-born pope — as “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” furious that Leo had condemned his threats against the people of Iran. Within the hour, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as a Christ-like figure — healing a bedridden man, flanked by bald eagles and the American flag.
Trump’s attacks on the pope — who is far more popular than he is — could prove self-destructive in the midterms.
There’s more about the rest of his coalition falling apart but the attack on the Pope is worth looking at more closely. He said in his post that he doesn’t think the Pope should criticize the president. But he went further in a phone interview with CBS News:
“He’s wrong on the issues,” Mr. Trump said of Pope Leo. “I don’t think he should be getting into politics. I think he probably learned that from this.”
[…]
The president also remarked that he believes he has “done more for the Catholic Church than any president in the last hundred years.” He said, “During COVID I gave them billions of dollars. They were gonna go under. I gave them billions of dollars for education and that’s not the right way to treat somebody that’s been so good.”
The Catholic Church was going to go under if he didn’t step in? What in the world is going on here? As he’s descending into dementia and panicking about his presidency failing on every front, his mendacious narcissism is becoming more and more audacious and absurd.
This is not unprecedented in history although we haven’t seen it quite this bad in a long time. Consider the following leaders:
Caligula (r. 37–41 AD): Known for extreme megalomania, he declared himself a living god, demanding to be worshipped. He allegedly ordered soldiers to collect seashells as “spoils of war” after a botched campaign against Neptune and humiliated the Senate by dressing as various deities, including Venus.
Domitian (r. 81–96 AD): He was the first to formalize his divinity, requiring subjects to address him as Dominus et Deus (Lord and God).
Commodus (r. 180–192 AD): Paranoiac and deeply narcissistic, he believed he was a reincarnation of Hercules. He fought in the arena as a gladiator and demanded the city of Rome be renamed after him.
Diocletian (r. 284–305 AD): Ended the pretense of republican government, forcing courtiers to prostrate themselves before him (kow-tow) and wear elaborate robes to establish himself as an Eastern-style god-king.
Charles VI of France (r. 1380–1422): Suffered from “glass delusion,” believing his body was made of glass and would shatter. He wore specially reinforced clothes with iron rods and forbade people from coming near him, forcing his courtiers to act as if his fragility was reality.
Princess Alexandra of Bavaria: Believed she had swallowed a glass piano as a child and would move sideways through doors to avoid breaking it.
King Ivan IV (The Terrible) of Russia: Known for severe paranoia, he often forced his boyars and subjects to engage in erratic, sadistic behavior to demonstrate loyalty.
I think this is where we’re going. He’s certifiable.
Update — It gets worse:
Bash: President Trump is attacking the pope in a phone call with an Italian newspaper. He said this about the pope: he doesn’t understand and shouldn’t be talking about war because he has no idea what’s happening.
Bash: President Trump is attacking the pope in a phone call with an Italian newspaper. He said this about the pope: he doesn’t understand and shouldn’t be talking about war because he has no idea what’s happening. President Trump went after Giorgia Meloni. She had said that his attacks on the pope were unacceptable. President Trump responded, saying it’s her who is unacceptable…
Yesterday, Trump “explained” that he had thought the blasphemous image he posted right after he slammed “Leo” as he casually calls the pope, shows him as a doctor not Jesus. Nobody believes him, of course, because it’s ridiculous. (In fact, had he said that he thought it showed him as a alien from another planet endowed with superpowers, it would have been more believable — especially with the demagorgan floating above his head.)
Anyway, this is the reality of Trump the caring doctor:
Andrew Harnik has been awarded the White House Correspondents’ Association award for excellence in presidential news coverage by visual journalists for the following photo: pic.twitter.com/YqU7ub6liL
Jackson County North Carolina Board of Elections during early voting in 2022. Photo by Lilly Knoepp.
ProPublica identified at least 75 people across multiple government agencies who worked to safeguard the 2020 election results against Donald Trump’s “stolen election” narrative:
The people we identified as resisting attempts to overturn the 2020 results have been replaced by roughly two dozen people Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections. Ten of them actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote, and the rest are associates of such people. In some cases, ProPublica found, officials have been hired from activist groups that are pillars of the election denial movement. Experts warn that shows the movement has merged with the federal government.
These new officials could influence how Trump reacts to the upcoming midterms as polling shows Republicans are approaching what could be a significant electoral loss, with the president’s approval rating nearing record lows, and public concern growing about the weak economy, the administration’s mass deportation effort and the war on Iran. Seemingly in preparation to head off such a blow, Trump has stepped up his efforts to “nationalize” the 2026 elections, saying that Republicans need “to take over” the midterms. Democrats who monitored Trump’s attempts to block his 2020 loss have begun to question whether he will allow a “blue wave,” particularly if it flips control of a House of Representatives that impeached him twice in his first term.
ProPublica’s examination reveals new details on how the president has unleashed his loyalists to transform elections. This includes the background of this year’s FBI raid in Georgia to seize 2020 election materials and how they are using federal resources to search for noncitizens voting. Ultimately, ProPublica’s reporting shows how thoroughly and expansively the Trump administration has overhauled the federal government into what some fear is a vehicle for making sure elections go his way.
We are heading into cornered animal territory. Don’t think otherwise.
Experts say 2026 will serve as an unprecedented stress test of the integrity of American elections.
“Our election system withstood” Trump’s “attacks following the 2020 election,” said Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat who has led the pushback to the administration’s actions on elections, “but this will be an even tougher test, with more election deniers having access to federal power than ever before.”
Treat this as real. Be vigilant. Attend regular meetings at your local Board of Elections to keep an eye on possible subterfuge.
ProPublica isn’t the only outlet keeping watch. Here are a couple from Democracy Docket:
For the most part, people stop at red lights even when there is no cop in sight. They stop because they accept that traffic laws make sense, that the system is fair enough, that the rules apply to them the way they apply to everyone else. Multiply that by every American filing a tax return, every soldier following an order, every bank honoring a check, every foreign central bank parking its savings in U.S. Treasuries. None of that is force. All of it is built on consent, on the consent of the governed.
Consent is what makes force cheap.
It is the legitimacy subsidy that runs underneath every powerful regime in history, and it is the most undervalued asset on any government’s balance sheet. With it, you can run a country on a normal-sized police force and borrow money at four percent. Without it, you need East German numbers of secret police and you pay fourteen percent.
Force at full price is ruinously expensive.
Trump is ruined. He’ll never admit it, but it’s true. “He is not consolidating power,” Burner writes. “He is spending the subsidy that made his power cheap, and he is spending it fast.”
Five rush hours a week, I see it out on the streets and the overpass where Sign Guy performs since Trump attacked Iran and sent fuel prices soaring. I wrote up an incident report last night for organizers of a weekly street-corner sign protest:
I’ve seen a marked increase in middle fingers in the weeks since Trump attacked Iran. And of course they’re braver about it when I’m out there solo. I’ve noticed that these betrayed MAGAs are easily triggered. But tonight was highly unusual.
Along with the usual honks, waves, and hand signs, the posing for pictures on the bridge and the passersby thanking me, this happened tonight.
Moderately heavy westbound traffic about 5:15 pm. A logo’d work truck in the fast lane. I didn’t catch the name (might have been a personal company). One driver, and one passenger (pretty sure).
Going about 35 mph, the driver opens his door, steps out onto the running board, and screams at me over the roof, “Get off the bridge, you fucking asshole! … something something.”
I watched over my shoulder to make sure the truck didn’t take the next downtown exit, planning to double back.
My sign this week simply reads: PLAN NOW FOR YOUR $5/GAL STAYCATION
Sign Guy deliberately avoids mentioning parties, personalities or policies. But that’s not enough to ward off misdirected anger. The MAGAs know Trump has betrayed them. And they really resent any reminders, even oblique ones. Except perhaps among fellow MAGAs.
“What letter grade would you give Trump?” the moderator asked. Final tally: 6 Ds, 6 Fs.
Economic Pain is Central
“When I see the price of groceries and gas, I want to scream.”
“Food and fuel prices are skyrocketing. Absolutely outrageous.”
“We go to Walmart every week. The exact same items increased exponentially every single time.”
“My main concern is inflation. The prices for food and gas.”
“We go to war in Iran and the prices just keep going up… but my bank account is shrinking.”
“It is affecting us personally.”
“I can’t even afford daycare.”
“I want to be a stay-at-home mom, but I have to work… how do you do all those things?”
“The job market… opportunities are very hard right now.”
“My mom’s on Social Security, and she worked for the federal government for 25 years. She does have Medicare and that doesn’t mean she’s a, what do you call it, freeloader. And Trump was like, oh we don’t have money. What did he say? We don’t have money for this anymore? I almost rolled over. I was like, are you kidding me? People pay into this so that they can retire… she’s 73, she can’t get a job now, you know.”
About that congressionally unsanctioned Iran war:
The Iran War Is a Failure
What they said:
“The war in Iran is unnecessary. My brother was in the Marines. I wouldn’t want him to die for this… it doesn’t have anything to do with us.”
“What happened to America first? Let’s take car of our own before we start blowing up other countries.”
“He actually said we needed to get over it… and he was very flippant… ‘we don’t have money… we’re at war’… I was like, are you kidding me?”
“First and foremost, I wholly 100% disagree with what’s going on with Iran… it’s been a disaster and completely contradictory to what he ran on… no more wars. Propaganda machine at its absolute finest…”
“I’m just intellectually insulted by being told… by Fox News… that this was justified.”
“It’s so much like a war for oil… like the speech last night said, if we’re producing all this oil and all this energy, so why do we care what goes on over there?”
“I’m very disappointed right now with the war in Iran… and how he treats our allies in Europe.”
“It’s about the integrity we used to have as a country… we used to be able to have diplomacy and negotiate and not bomb the negotiators… And I just kind of feel like we have slid… now we’re the country you can’t trust… we used to be the good guys.”
“All of the… foreign affairs… the way that he speaks and certain actions that he takes… in some senses, I regret my vote.”
Trump’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein was another sore point. The group was not buying that Trump wasn’t involved. “It does feel like a mockery,” said one. “I voted Republican for Christian values… and now it’s turned into something completely different.”
He sold them out. They know it. Even if they won’t admit it in public but will in a “safe space.”
And they were done pretending everything was fine.
And while the themes had been broken promises and failed execution, there was something else that caught me off guard.
They were sick of him.
His behavior. His character. The constant divisiveness. The everything-is-about-him fatigue. The social corrosion. The sense that the country just feels worse to live in.
What they want now, one subject offered, is “a normal Republican candidate and not a Donald Trump crony… just a normal human… that’s all I want.”
I titled this post “The Great Divorce.” The title comes from a 1945 novel by British author C. S. Lewis. The plot involves ghosts consigned to Hell (or Purgatory), imagined as a vast grey city where it always rains. Some of them take a bus trip excursion to the outskirts of Heaven. They might, if they choose, remain and experience joy there. If they still can. In the most memorable scene, a heavenly woman, Sarah, speaks to her husband-ghost, Frank. She appeals for him to stay. But he cannot let go of earthly bitterness and his need to manipulate her. He, or what’s left of him, will return to the Hell he’s embraced. Sarah’s joy is undiminished in Heaven. His melodrama cannot touch her there.
Frank’s character is a complicated metaphor for the way humans use pity and self-loathing to manipulate other people, though he only appears toward the end of the novel. In life Frank knew and was loved by Sarah Smith, and would take advantage of her love by pretending that she’d hurt his feelings. Indeed, Frank has a long history of pretending to be sad in order to make other people feel guilty—even as a child he would do so. In the afterlife, Frank appears as two different ghosts, one small (the Dwarf), the other tall (the Tragedian). The Dwarf represents Frank’s inner life: his self-hatred, and his manipulative tendencies. The Tragedian, on the other hand, represents the “image” of pain and sadness that Frank tries to project in order to make other people feel guilty. Thus, in the afterlife Frank takes on a form that externalizes the psychological processes by which Frank would try to “blackmail” Sarah into feeling sorry for him.
Trump began his MAGA movement by giving supporters others toward whom to misdirect their anger over miseries real, imagined, or manufactured: immigrants, liberals, “wokeism,” a Black president, etc. But while these MAGAs are done with Trump, they are not done with the grievances that led them to him and that he exploited.
Mersault writes:
So this is not the moment to exhale.
They hadn’t abandoned all their beliefs.
They still wanted hardline border crackdowns driven by exaggerated fears about who was crossing, repeating inflammatory claims about “rapists and murderers.”
They still clung to a “pro-life” identity while ignoring the very real human cost of Republican policies that erode care, stability, and survival for the very people they say they value.
They still invoked “freedom” to reject vaccines, masks, and other public health measures, elevating anecdote (“I know someone who had a heart attack a week after the COVID vaccine.”) over overwhelming scientific evidence.
They still gave oxygen to conspiracies about stolen elections and hidden cabals of Democratic elites running child-trafficking rings out of pizza parlors.
They still distrusted expertise and institutions, except when those same institutions confirmed their own biases.
“They may be ready to fire the CEO, but not abandon the business model,” Mersault concludes. Any more than Frank can let go of needing to control Sarah or Rupert Murdock can let go of stoking hatreds. MAGAs need to control the country, their lessers, and any others.
Sign Guy dancing on an overpass with PLAN NOW FOR YOUR $5/GAL STAYCATION set off Reckless Endangerment Guy in a big way. (And I mean, he was out of control.) He still needs someone else to blame for his own disillusionment. Even with Trump’s favorables in the golden toilet, his political enemies remain. With Republicans facing a 2026 wipeout, it’s possible we’ll see more hysteria.
What Artemis II mission specialist Christina Koch saw when she looked back at Earth was not the beautiful, blue marble celebrated in photos from decades-old Apollo missions. What struck her more was all the blackness of space surrounding it. She had a revelation. Not unlike what William Shatner experienced, only different, but just as profound.
When in 2021 legendary Star Trek actor, William Shatner, 90, took a ten-minute, sub-orbital flight aboard a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket, it reduced him to tears:
Shatner: I saw the spaceship coming through the blue, and an instant later it was through the blue; this bullet exploded into the blackness of space, so in that instant I saw the blue suddenly disappear, and suddenly space is smack up in my face. I saw death there. The suddenness with which I looked at that blackness, I thought, “whoa, suddenly you go out there and then you’re dead.”
People often cry when they first see Earth from space, space philosopher Frank White wrote in his 1987 book, “The Overview Effect.”
“I wept for the Earth because I realized it’s dying,” Shatner said. “I dedicated my book, Boldly Go, to my great-grandchild, who’s three now — coming three — and in the dedication, say it’s them, those youngsters, who are going to reap what we have sown in terms of the destruction of the Earth.”
Koch saw that blackness too, the same blackness surrounding the Artemis II capsule. She realized we are all astronauts. On a lifeboat.
“Planet Earth: You. Are. A. Crew.”
when christina koch said ''You. Are. A. Crew.'' she literally summed up a whole philosophy in one line. like humanity is one crew on this planet and we either make it together or we dont. this aint just a moon mission tbh its a message for all of us down here.
One reason people go to protests like No Kings is the reassurance they give that you’re not alone when the world feels like it’s going to hell around you. Even for MAGAs threatened by the presence of taco trucks and Mexican roofers. It’s why MAGAs go to Trump rallies. As the woman told a reporter, “He [Trump] says what I’m thinking.”
Matt Bai provides a touch of that in between mass rallies with a Rolling Stone piece about “the mind-blowing incompetence” of the Trump administration in its 2.0 incarnation. Trump learned in his first term that for his purposes (having nothing to do with actual governing), competence just got in his way:
Competence — and by that I mean the most fundamental, entry-level, don’t-blow-up-the-world kind of competence — was more of a thing in the first Trump term, when the president cycled through a series of senior aides, old-line party and military types, who saw themselves as buffers between Trump and the various agencies. Four years in exile liberated Trump from all of that. His second-term team comprises mainly fringe players and pugnacious pundits, people more comfortable with pancake makeup than managing complex bureaucracies, for which they have nothing but contempt anyway. It’s a bold experiment, but one that seemed ill-fated from the start.
Except for the nihilistic thirst Trump 2.0 has for destruction.
Exhibit A:
Put it this way: When Trump finally replaced Kristi Noem with Markwayne Mullin, a former plumber and MMA fighter who keeps intimating that he’s been some kind of secret military agent but can’t talk about it, every sane person in Washington applauded as if this were the second coming of James Baker in his prime. That tells you all you need to know.
Guys like that are all you need to preside “over a failed state.” It’s been a long road.
We know now that George W. Bush’s decline into chaos wasn’t merely a temporary nadir for the right. It marked the end of a 40-year run for neoconservatism and ultimately led to Trump’s hostile takeover of the party. Similarly, whether MAGA outlives Trump as a viable political force won’t only depend on whether it can still appeal to some slim margin of white voters. It will also depend on whether Republicans can shake the image of a party that seethes with contempt for government but is fundamentally unserious about running it.
You mean like “trickle down economics” unserious? Or “make the pie higher” unserious? Or “A whole civilization will die tonight” unserious? America’s problem is broader than the Republican Party. We as a people are “America elected Donald Trump president twice” unserious.
A federal judge on Monday dismissed President Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the publisher of The Wall Street Journal over its report of his lewd birthday greeting to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Judge Darrin Gayles in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Florida said in his decision that Mr. Trump had not “plausibly alleged” that The Journal published the article with actual malice, meaning that it knew what it was publishing was false, or had acted with reckless disregard as to its accuracy. He dismissed the complaint without prejudice, allowing Mr. Trump to bring the same claim again.
Trump will try, of course, or find some less-monetary way to exact his revenge on the Journal, the Times, or other outlets that publish news he finds unflattering. It costs him money to bring such suits, but it costs his enemies to defend against them, so that works for Trump.
Now if the MAGA rubes still supporting Trump will stop donating to his lawsuit funds, maybe these frivolous lawsuits will dry up before Trump’s dessicated corpse does.
This should count for something but I’m afraid it won’t…
Americans vote on personality, looks and charisma not accomplishment and a lot of people just don’t like Newsom. (Is it the hair???) But he has been a good governor of a huge and often ungovernable state. I just think it’s good to point that out once in a while before we decide which candidate we’d like to have a beer with.
Anyway:
Of all the prevailing media narratives around Gavin Newsom, the one that is most conspicuous by its absence is how under its two-term governor California became the top performing economy not just among its 49 siblings but also any developed nation…
Amid the thousands of headlines referencing California failings with wildfires, droughts, floods, mass transportation, aging roads, education, homelessness, unaffordable housing, widening inequality and poverty along with the exodus of billionaires, corporate headquarters and longtime residents — never mind the “slick” label whenever the betting favorite for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination is mentioned in the press – the Golden State (population 39 million people), just supplanted Japan (123 million) as the fourth-largest economy.
Gross domestic product surged 40% to more than $4 trillion, accounting for more than 14% of US output, after Newsom took office in January 2019. China’s, the world’s second-largest economy, expanded 32% and No. 3 Germany increased 16%, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. (The US dollar’s appreciation was as little as 1.6% since the end of 2018 as measured by the Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index, so the currency wasn’t a primary factor behind California’s performance.)
The US is an also-ran competing with California’s prosperity, based on indexes compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia that take state level nonfarm payroll employment, average hours worked in manufacturing by production employees, the unemployment rate and wage and salary disbursements that are then deflated by the consumer price index.
“We have had a theory” for California’s superior performance “but it hasn’t been validated in the way these numbers obviously provide,” said the 58-year-old Newsom during an April 1 Zoom interview. “So the timing could not be better.”
California’s not-so-secret sauce happens to be the diversity between its citizens’ ears instead of the fossil fuels generating the biggest share of Texas growth. Of the 10,000 companies in the Bloomberg World Large, Mid & Small Cap Index, the technology sector’s 20% share of their total value is the largest of any sector. And within that subset of technology, California leads with 41-based firms producing a 603% total return (income plus appreciation) over the past decade. That’s almost four times the gain of their global peers the past two, three and five years. Tech’s contribution to California’s GDP increased 59% since 2019, outperforming the 40% gain for states overall.
Healthcare shows a similar trajectory. The industry’s contribution to California GDP increased by 52% since 2019 and including 2025, a year when President Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans enacted major cuts to Medicaid and reduced Affordable Care Act premium tax credits, resulting in an estimated 15 million people losing health coverage. California’s uninsured rate declined to a record-low 6.4% in 2023, the largest drop in the US, from more than 17% a decade ago, helped by the Covered California and Medi-Cal expanded coverage programs.
Although “some of California’s most prominent venture capitalists have a proclivity for slamming their state, arguing that fiscal mismanagement and high taxes will cause startups to form elsewhere,” the opposite is happening, according to Axios. “California startups raised a whopping 62% of all U.S. venture capital dollars in 2025,” Axios notes, citing the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor, more than either 2024 (54.2%) or 2023 (46.9%), as well as the decade-earlier mark of 47.2%.
Even when artificial intelligence giants OpenAI, Anthropic and DataBricks dominate, the state remained “home to 31.5% of US VC deals last year, compared to 31.7% in 2024 and 29.1% in 2023,” according to data referenced by Axios. “In 2015, California’s market share was 32.5%. For context, the runner-up in 2025 was New York with 13.3%. Massachusetts was next, just ahead of Texas — both below 6%. The bottom line: California’s crown may be tarnished on social media. On spreadsheets, however, it still sparkles.”
California companies are similarly booming, spending $527 billion annually on acquisitions during Newsom’s tenure, almost three times the $179 billion spent annually in the 20 years prior to 2019, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Software and technology services accounted for $1.9 trillion, including SpaceX’s $250 billion offer for xAI. The healthcare industry initiated $410 billion of transactions, including Thousand Oaks-based Amgen’s $27 billion purchase of Ireland’s Horizon Therapeutics PLC in 2023. The deal enabled the biotechnology medicines company to increase its market value 39% to $200 billion.
Even accounting for less than 12% of the US population, California contributed more than 40% of the growth in the value of nation’s publicly traded equities as measured by the companies in the Russell 3000 Index, which returned 182% for investors since 2019. California accounted for 70 percentage points, more than triple No. 2 Washington (20 points), almost five times No. 3 Texas (15 points) and No. 4 New York (13 points) and almost 12 times No. 5 Ohio (6 points), according to data compiled by Bloomberg. California-based companies overall returned 328% to investors, crushing the equity returns from the world’s largest economies: US, 182%; China, 89%; Germany, 110%; Japan, 96%; and India, 63%, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
None of this is accidental. Sixteen years after it became a state in 1850, California passed its first compulsory education law, requiring children aged eight to 14 to attend school. With more than 600 colleges and universities, California today has no peers in higher education, whether in the US or any of the world’s developed economies. No. 2 New York has 423, Germany 420 and the UK no more than 300. California graduates more engineers than any state and pays the highest wages when they join the workforce.
California’s relative value among investors is reflected in the municipal bond market, where two of the top 10 performing issuers tied to education are based. The University of California, No. 1 in total return, accounts for 12% of the 800 issuers’ gains, and No. 3 California State University contributes 5%, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s another way of saying investors in California are getting 11% of their return from the University of California, the Los Angeles Unified School District and California State University. California’s investment in education translates as one college or university for 64,000 citizens compared to 266,000 in the UK and 199,000 in Germany.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Newsom became “the first sitting governor to visit the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach… since Ronald Reagan,” said Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, the biggest US gateway to global trade, handling more than $300 billion of cargo annually. “That’s a statement,” Seroka said during an interview at Bloomberg headquarters in New York earlier this year. “In the line-item budgets of the last three fiscal years,” Newsom “has helped with additional infrastructure spending, hard infrastructure line-item budgets, our transition to zero emissions on both equipment and electricity.”
Whatever criticism Newsom receives from environmentalists for not doing enough to hold corporate polluters accountable, he still gets relatively high marks for promoting investments in resilience, clean energy and clean transportation. The eight California-based clean energy companies with a minimum market value of $100 million have seen the value of their stocks appreciate an average 56% since 2019, compared to 40% for their global peers. Their 7% average annual gain in revenue crushes the 5% global average. California renewable energy companies will see 17% revenue growth in the coming year, more than doubling the 7% increase of global peers, according to analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg.
San Francisco, where Newsom began his political career and was its two-time mayor, is the only US city that reduced pollutants by more than 20%, according to the analysis of almost 100 cities around the world.
The global transition to zero-emission vehicles — decreasing air pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and greenhouse gases — began in Fremont, California, with Tesla, the world’s largest automaker with a market capitalization of $1.4 trillion, or more than four times perennial sales leader Toyota Motor Corp. Even after Musk, Tesla’s CEO, decried California as “a land of taxes, over-regulation and litigation” when he moved the company’s headquarters along with its research and development leadership to Texas in 2021, the world’s richest person admitted a year later that Tesla couldn’t succeed without California-based engineers.
“I will never forget” when Musk “called me,” said Newsom. “He said, `I’m surprised you’re picking up the phone. I may actually ask you for some help” because “I can’t find the talent in Texas. Don’t say a word.’”
Yes, I know we suck and Newsom has creepy hair. And there are many negatives about him on the culture front (along with some positives.) But nobody’s perfect.
Maybe, as a nation in deep, serious decline, we should at least consider looking at him seriously?
