California dreaming

California governor Gavin Newsom recently called Donald Trump a “jackass.”

He resorts to no such name-calling in his captivatingly offbeat memoir.

The U.S. president surfaces only at the tail end of the book. And Trump manages to indict himself as an idiot without need of pejoratives from Newsom.

Newsom is widely considered a top contender for the Democratic Party’s 2028 nomination for president. He has said he’s considering a run for the office, but deferring a decision until after the 2026 U.S. mid-term elections.

There’s little in the way of polemic in this memoir. It’s not even overly political until near the end. Rather, it is deeply personal and abundantly familial.

It tells you who Gavin Newsom is, and where and who he comes from. At times it’s as much the story of his family and forebears as it is him.

He’s a child of divorce, so there’s lots of inside stories about how he dealt with his parents’ split, especially as it relates to his gifted but mercurial father.

Born and raised in San Francisco, his early life ping-ponged between hardscrabble near-poverty and opulent glamour.

His father, William Newsom, was a close friend of billionaire oil tycoon Gordon Getty, attorney for Getty Oil and also a manager of the Getty family trust.

But his parents divorced when he was three and he and his younger sister, Hilary, were raised largely by their mother Tessa, and pretty much solely on her dime. Tessa often worked three jobs — waitress, bookkeeper and secretary — to support them.

His modest upbringing was periodically upended by his father’s proximity to the Getty family.

The Gettys often invited young Newsom and his sister to grand celebrity-studded dinners in their mansion, or flew them, with the four Getty sons, in a private jet to the family palazzo in Venice or to Tanzania for a safari.

“There was the education Hilary and I received at school and the education we gained by virtue of our relationship with the Gettys, including summer vacations that lifted us out of one reality and plopped us down in another,” is how he describes it.

“We climbed aboard private jets and yachts and limos that whisked us to luxury hotels and royal palaces, inducing a shock to our systems that Hilary would later describe as something out of Cinderella.”

Newsom’s first personal encounter with Donald Trump was aboard the president’s Marine One helicopter in November 2018, in Newsom’s capacity as governor-elect, when Trump visited northern California in the wake of devastating wildfires that killed 85 people and wiped out the town of Paradise (which Trump repeatedly called Pleasure).

It was an eye-opening chopper flight, and made Newsom witness to the fact that Trump’s cruelty extends even to his own family.

In front of Newsom, California governor Jerry Brown, Trump’s chief of staff Gen. John Kelly and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump went on at length about his failure to create a romantic link between former NFL quarterback Tom Brady and his daughter Ivanka — while she was dating Kushner. It embarrassed everyone, and humiliated Kushner.

He sums up the bizarre episode thusly: “Here we were fifteen minutes into our first meeting, and he did not bat an eye, showing me how callous he could be, and at the expense of a family member. I asked myself days later: What kind of an ego could do that?”

Newsom writes in a fresh and highly personal voice. He impresses as a guy whose life has been lived with a few mistakes and a number of regrets, but with reasonable grace and honesty.

You get the sense he wrote this look back as a cathartic exercise — reflecting on his past as a way to come to grips with a comxsplicated history.

He never holds himself out as an uber leader who’ll singlehandedly restore American governance to reason and honesty.

But he comes off as someone who at least offers the promise of a presidential candidate of stature and integrity.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.