Gavin Newsom Muffs His Chance With NBC’s Jake Soboroff Like Joe Biden Did With George Stephanopoulos

Oh look, they want you to go donate for “relief” to…*Democrats*

Probably because they need signs like this: https://t.co/TJt3mtzVzi pic.twitter.com/cDDupBqmOY

— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) January 11, 2025

Sometimes, it’s not just fascinating how history can repeat itself, but how quickly it can happen. After Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance against President-Elect Donald Trump, both his Delaware campaign headquarters and the press shop at the White House knew they had disaster on their hand – a crisis of confidence in Biden’s leadership abilities, and they had to do something in a hurry before campaign donations and support dried up.

There were plenty of sycophantic outlets within regime media that were ready, willing, and able to step in and serve as the public relations first responders in an one-on-one interview setting. CBS would have loved to have had the first bite at the apple. I’m sure Margaret Brennan, Norah O’Donnell, any number of partisan lefties pretending to be journalists would have gladly volunteered. NBC certainly has their share of Democrats in reporter clothing without having to dive even deeper into the tank by selecting someone from MSNBC. CNN’s Dana Bash, Jake Tapper threw their objectivity out the window early in 2024, so they would have gladly been first to answer the alarm bell. 

But in reality, for the White House and Election headquarters in Wilmington, they needed the best, most partisan hack of all – George Stephanopoulos on ABC. Even with the lighting, the makeup, the edits, the telegraphed questions, Biden still couldn’t deliver, and within a fortnight, he withdrew from the contest. 

You remember how bad Biden was, right? Here’s just a snippet to job your memory.

I’m not sure people realize how BAD that George Stephanopoulos interview was for Biden.

The way he answered that question-

– National Security Council?
– NYT had me down 10 points?
– He lied 28 times?
– The way the debate ran?

THE MAN CANNOT KEEP A COHERENT THOUGHT! pic.twitter.com/jGFGkNEGSi

— Free (@KaladinFree) July 6, 2024

Biden had his golden opportunity to demonstrate he hadn’t lost his mental acuity, and instead exacerbated it. 

Kamala Harris initially ran on a strategy of doing no one-on-one media at all until it became absolutely necessary. And then when it became absolutely necessary, she was just as horrific as Biden, except in her own way. Even though Biden never had a ton of intelligence in the first place, he was at one time rhetorically quick on his feet. When he lost that much off his fastball, there wasn’t anything left to offer. In Kamala’s case, she has been outclassed in being able to think on her feet since entering politics, and no one could make her smarter. All they could do was hide her to prevent the knowledge of that weakness from becoming widespread. 

Gavin Newsom got his chance for political redemption on Sunday’s Meet the Press. He had a standing one-on-one from the lawn of just one of the thousands of burned out California structures with NBC’s Jacob Soboroff. Soboroff has spent the week doing his darndest for MSNBC to minimize the Democratic Party’s exposure in fire response, and clearly was there to rehabilitate the California Governor after a very rough week. 

Newsom, fighting a political fire of his own making, threw accelerant on it. 

Soboroff came into the interview as someone with a political agenda. Yes, he has roots here, and reported from the ruins of a house in which he spent his childhood. But at every turn, his commentary and analysis reflected a viewpoint meant to minimize the damage to Democrats at all levels of governance for appearing grossly incompetent. Here’s one example on where he believes blame should really be shifted – to Elon Musk. 

Of course, he was commenting on reports from former L.A. mayoral candidate Rick Caruso that the hydrants in Pacific Palisades ran dry. Soboroff blamed the fire on climate change and environment, and anything else is disinformation. We later learned the Santa Ynez reservoir, which usually supports the Palisades, was offline for most of 2024. Had it had water in it, in all likelihood the water pressure could have been sustained Tuesday night when it was needed most. 

Soboroff also was quick to praise Joe Biden for his response to the fires. 

This was on Thursday. Few people in the path of the fires, which at that point were under 10% contained, felt like help was here. In reality, the arrival of Air Force One hindered water dropping flight operations for over an hour. This was Democratic spin in a fire jacket. 

It’s no surprise that Soboroff was chosen to be the interlocutor for Newsom. And for his part, he did his best to spin the questioning so that Newsom would have the easiest time deflecting blame and responsibility. 

Of course, the premise of Soboroff’s question, even when redirected, is not true. It doesn’t matter. Soboroff set the narrative with his regime media compatriots. Within hours, The Hill and the New York Times has written it up in print stories as if it were the gospel truth. 

With a week to go in his presidency and all out of f’s to give, the outgoing 82-year-old president agreed to cover 100% of the costs for victims of the fire on behalf of you and me taxpayers. 100%. Western North Carolina hasn’t gotten that promise. Biden leaves office in one week. His promise of 100% relief also expires in one week. Donald Trump was asked if he was going to cover what will be hundreds of billions of dollars of damage and rebuilding, and in his usual form, said not without some serious steps to make sure this never has to happen again. 

Soboroff, being the Democratic operative he is, turned that answer into Trump allegedly being against first responders, and Newsom still fumbled his way through the answer. Once Soboroff replanted the talking point halfway through, Newsom picked up on where he was going and ran with it. 

If anyone’s interested in the truth, Donald trump actually proposed eliminating federal taxes for first responders, especially police, fire, and military. He said this on an October 18th, 2024 Outkick podcast. 

Continuing in his quest to find taxes to eliminate for specific voting groups, former President Donald Trump said Friday that he would consider eliminating federal income taxes for first responders, members of the military and veterans. 

“It’s something I would think about,” Trump said in response to a question on the issue during an interview aired on OutKick, a sports news site. 

According to Bloomberg’s Stephanie Lai, eliminating taxes on first responders and the military would be one of the largest exemptions yet for Trump, who has also proposed nixing taxes on Social Security benefits, overtime pay and tip income, among other things. Lai notes that there are roughly 18 million veterans, 1.3 million active duty personnel, 1 million police officers and 300,000 firefighters in the United States.

We’ll get to whatever utopia Gavin Newsom envisions building now in his head in a little bit, but the key exchange, the one where Newsom took every swing at the plate he could and still came up empty, was where the buck stops.

The answer was so stunningly bad, it needs to be read to be fully appreciated for its inanity. 

JS: Ultimately here, does the buck stop with you? 

GN: I mean, you’re governor of California. And Biden will be the mayor of California. We’re all in this together. We’re all better off, and we’re all better off, and we’re all better off when we’re working together to take care of people, and to make sure people are supported. We’re empathetic, and we’re here not just in the immediacy of the crisis, but we’re here after the crisis as opposed to creating a crisis in the middle of this by trying to divide people and play political, take cheap political shots.

This answer can be broken down into two parts. Scribes often suffer at times with writer’s block. Not me, though, thank God. I live in California, and there are endless supplies of Democrats. Even if things plane out on the national level, I can always find progressive subjects with which to write and podcast about. But writer’s block does happen. You sit down at the blinking cursor on a blank page, you can’t find the right word to start, and so you’re stuck. One of the ways in which to break through that wall is to just start typing stuff. Anything. Transcribe a Biden or a Kamala speech. Before too long, you start shifting to writing what you’re thinking instead of what your reading, and you can resume what you were doing. 

The first half of Newsom’s answer here was just saying a string of words until a coherent thought eventually formed. He hears the question – ultimately, doesn’t the buck stop with you? His ego refuses to allow him to say yes, and he knows he can’t pull a Karen Bass, just clamming up and refusing to say anything, so he has to say something. ‘Biden is mayor of California’ isn’t exactly the first thing I would conjure up, and I’m sure that’s not exactly of comfort to Angelinos staring down the barrel of what will be north of $300 billion in damage. 

Then Newsom decides to dodge the question entirely by saying he doesn’t want to create a crisis by trying to divide people and take cheap political shots…like accusing the President-Elect of threatening to defund first responders. And as for dividing people, if you were the one at the center of this catastrophe, and all eyes were on you looking for leadership, would you go onto a national political podcast made up of Barack Obama’s foreign policy kiddie corps so that you can fundraise for Act Blue and claim that it eventually will go to fire victims? That seems kind of divisive to me, but what do I know?

He ended up saying he’s envisioned a Marshall Plan 2.0 for the City of Angels. Kinda sounded like martial law, but his Marshall Plan seems to be fast-tracking environmental concerns to allow for clean-up and rebuilding, but not without concerns for environmental concerns and not deviating from what was there originally by more than 10%…except demanding a lot of new building requirements that sound like more than a 10% deviation from original. In short, he’s winging it. He’s signed proclamations that are the equivalent of what Mel Brooks’ Governor William J. Lepetomane signed in order to buy land from the Indians – a case of paddleball toys. 

When it comes to his two-faced answer on why the fire hydrants didn’t work Tuesday night, Newsom tried to parrot Soboroff’s initial line – that it’s misinformation that the hydrants didn’t work. All of the reservoirs were full. Except Soboroff brings up the dry Santa Ynez, to which Newsom immediately backpedaled, claiming it’s not his fault.

As for Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, the chorus of voices calling to recall her from office are growing by the minute. Former child actress Justine Bateman introduced this on X a little earlier Sunday afternoon to help explain why we are just learning the depth of how incompetent L.A.’s leadership is. 

This is from my friend @ericspiegelman, who served as a commissioner under both Mayor Garcetti (and then Bass, for a moment).
There is no end to the ball-dropping this week by Karen Bass and her office. pic.twitter.com/yEPJ5pQ9HK

— Justine Bateman (@JustineBateman) January 11, 2025

If you want to know why the fire damage was as bad as it was, here’s Michael Shellenberger with the rest of the story. 

Wait until the mudslides hit in the next couple months. And then the inevitable mismanagement of that disaster. And when no one knows what the rules are because of Newsom’s indecipherable executive orders, you’ll see chaos as federal, state, county, and city agencies all give conflicting orders about permitting rebuilding. Before too long, Californians are going to want Gavin Newsom to go the way of Joe Biden. They already want Karen Bass to beat the President to retirement. 

The long national nightmare may be over for the country in seven days, but for people in the Golden State, there’s two full years of pain and suffering to go. But things feel different here. Pastor Jack Hibbs is the senior pastor of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills. He led a weekly Bible study out of the Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa movement in the early 90s, and it has grown into its own full-time church with 10,000 regular attendees on Sunday. Hibbs is about as mainline an Evangelical as they come. Full disclosure: I am steeped in the Calvary Chapel network, currently attending Harvest OC, one of the two churches run by Pastor Greg Laurie. The Harvest movement was launched 50 years ago out of Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa. 

At the beginning of Hibbs’ sermon, as I suspect was part of every sermon in Southern California, there were thoughts, prayers, and calls to action for how to pitch in and help the relief efforts to those in L.A. County finding themselves homeless. Hibbs, however, was righteously angry, because none of this had to happen. I’m sure there are plenty of congregants in his church that vote Democratic, and Hibbs shined a spotlight on that. 

It’s time for change in California! After witnessing devastating failures in leadership, it’s clear that the people of California deserve much better.

It’s time to stand up for the future of this state and support leaders who truly care about the people and take the action… pic.twitter.com/sp5AewQ1FV

— Jack Hibbs (@RealJackHibbs) January 12, 2025

I’m sure this will be viewed as controversial within Christianity in general, and probably even within Evangelicalism specifically, but it’s a hard truth that needed to be said. Democrats in leadership will get you killed. It’ll get your property destroyed. They have failed you repeatedly, and will continue to fail you until you finally make a change in your behavior and quit electing them to power. 

Time will tell whether this anger builds or dissipates, but as the Santa Ana winds begin to swirl outside once again, with all three major fires still burning and countless arsonists, most of them products of progressive politics in Los Angeles and Sacramento, still running around, my bet is on the groundswell of people demanding change growing.