Gavin Newsom — the hair apparent to the Democrat presidential throne — just got caught doing something so perfectly Newsom that you’d think a satirist made it up. His supposedly “bestselling” book? His own political action committee bought roughly two-thirds of every copy sold. The man literally purchased his own bestseller status with donor money.
What a time to be alive. The guy who wants to run the entire country can’t fill a Barnes & Noble without his PAC showing up with a company credit card and cleaning out the display rack.
Let’s walk through what happened here because the details are even funnier than the headline. Newsom published a book — presumably about how great California is, which tells you everything you need to know about the man’s relationship with reality — and it was marketed as a “bestseller.” Impressive! Except when you look at the actual sales numbers, his Campaign for Democracy PAC was responsible for buying roughly 66% of every copy that moved. Two out of every three books went straight from the printer to Newsom’s own political operation.
That’s not a bestseller. That’s a guy buying his own Girl Scout cookies.
Think about it. Donors gave money to Newsom’s PAC, presumably to fund political campaigns and advance Democrat causes. Instead, Gavin used it to bulk-buy his own book so he could slap “bestseller” on the cover and use it as a prop for his presidential ambitions. So the money people donated for politics got laundered into book royalties that went right into Newsom’s pocket. (Ka-ching!)
ZeroHedge called it what it is — money laundering. And honestly, they’re being kind. At least money launderers have the decency to use a car wash or a pizza shop. Newsom used a book nobody wanted to read.
Here’s the part that really makes you laugh. This is the same Gavin Newsom who spent the last two years positioning himself as the future of the Democrat Party. The next Obama. The guy who was going to sweep in and save progressives from their Kamala hangover. And he couldn’t organically sell enough copies of his book to fill a mid-size Uber.
We’ve seen vanity projects before in politics. Hillary Clinton’s book tour that played to half-empty auditoriums. Kamala’s memoir that ended up in the remainder bin before the ink was dry. But Newsom took it to a whole new level. He didn’t just fail to sell books — he set up an entire financial pipeline to fake it. His PAC basically became a one-customer bookstore.
Pop quiz: If a politician’s own supporters won’t buy his book voluntarily, what makes him think 330 million Americans want him as president?
The answer, of course, is that Newsom doesn’t care about the answer. He cares about the optic. “Bestselling author” looks good on a debate stage backdrop. It looks good in a campaign bio. Nobody checks the receipts — or at least, nobody was supposed to check the receipts.
But we checked. And the receipts show that Gavin Newsom’s “bestseller” had essentially one customer: Gavin Newsom.
This is Fyre Festival for political publishing. All the marketing, all the hype, all the Instagram-ready branding — and when you show up, there’s no music, no food, and you’re sleeping in a disaster relief tent. Except in this version, the only person who showed up was the promoter himself, buying tickets to his own concert.
The really beautiful thing about this story is what it tells us about the Democrat bench. This is the guy they think is going to win back the White House. He can’t even win a book sale without rigging it. He ran California into the ground so badly that people are literally fleeing the state in U-Hauls, and now we find out he can’t move a paperback without his PAC playing bulk buyer.
If Newsom ever does run for president, we already know his campaign strategy: have his PAC buy two-thirds of the votes.
Good luck with that, hair apparent. We’ll be watching the receipts.
