Larry Wilson: Newsom comms guy makes with the f-bombs - Pasadena Star News

Getting your

Trinity Audioplayer ready...Remember when the job of an American politician’s spokesperson was nothing more nor less than always trying to make their guy, occasionally gal, look good?

Remember when, since they mostly talked with members of the press, they were respectful toward members of the press, if not out of innate kindness then at least because they knew on which side their bread was buttered?

Yeah, well, the entire genteel rest of human history, meet 2026.

In Washington, D.C., the current president’s press secretary, a really shady operative called Karoline Leavitt, believes it’s her job, and apparently it is, to berate the press when she’s asked a question she doesn’t like. Asked at a formal White House briefing about the killings of two Americans by federal officers in Minneapolis in January, Leavitt declined to respond, merely calling the reporter a “left-wing hack” for daring to raise the subject. She calls other legitimate questions “frankly ridiculous” and “stupid.” She once even replied “Your mom” when asked a normal question about peace talks on Ukraine.

So perhaps she’s setting the tone for comms folks far and wide in America, because out of Sacramento last week came the news that a spokesperson for our governor “isn’t just Gavin Newsom’s chief defender on social media. Increasingly, he is becoming the headline himself,” as Dustin Gardiner and Melanie Mason report in Politico.

Izzy Gardon is one of the “staffers behind the governor’s strategy to counteract Donald Trump’s second presidency by embracing a combative tone and a trolling online presence,” they add. And, like Leavitt, he “is suddenly becoming a focal point of the attention — and backlash.”

I feel like such a prude to say so, but that’s because the governors are entirely off, so to speak, the former unwritten rule that public figures or their spokesfolk shouldn’t curse or swear or say rude things in public.

Nowadays, presumably with his boss’s support or at least acquiescence, Gardon labeled rapper and MAGA activist Nicki Minaj a “stupid hoe” on his X account.

He sent an email telling conservative journalist Susan Crabtree to “Respectfully, (bleep) off.” The bleep is my euphemism. We still don’t use the word in the newspaper. What good is swearing if it’s common as dirt?

The Newsom people are using a “But they started it” approach to the war of words, saying they are merely fighting fire with fire.

By going on the offensive by being offensive, “That ethos is how we’re fighting Trump and feeds into the engine of how we’re fighting Trump in these appalling times,” Bob Salladay, Newsom senior adviser and Gardon’s boss, told Playbook. “Izzy’s creativity and imagination is part of what the governor is doing.”

Also what the governor is doing is tossing around f-bombs himself.

First, Newsom took flak for weirdly bringing up his crummy SAT scores in a conversation with a Black politician — “I’m like you; I’m no better than you,” he told Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and people in the audience at a recent event on his book tour. “I’m a 960 SAT guy.” (I really love South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott’s reply to that one: “Black Americans aren’t your low bar.”)

But the reaction gave Newsom another chance for outrage.

“You didn’t give a (bleep) about the President of the United States of America posting an ape video of President [Barack] Obama or calling African nations (bleep)holes — but you’re going to call me racist for talking about my lifelong struggle with dyslexia?” Newsom penned on his own X account. “Spare me your fake (bleep) outrage.”Perhaps my nostalgia for chivalrous days of yore is misplaced. President Richard Nixon, say, nice Quaker boy from Whittier that he was, certainly didn’t swear in public. But the tape machines he installed on himself in the White House show that he certainly did swear in private: F-bombs drop like confetti on the Nixon tapes that Watergate — that the press’s exposure of Watergate — forced the release of.

But I don’t have to like it, this new boorishness. It takes the fun out of swearing in private when world leaders do it in public. Pols, comms guys, bite your tongues.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. [email protected].