Gavin Newsom leaned into Bill Maher‘s chair on Friday night with the confidence of a man who believes his own highlight reel.
He was there to sell a memoir called Young Man in a Hurry and, without quite saying it, a presidential campaign. Maher had already called him “officially the frontrunner” for the 2028 Democratic nomination. The lights were right. The audience was warm. And when the conversation turned to whether Democrats have the stomach to fight, Newsom reached for the story he clearly considers his finest moment.
“The reason I started to take on DeSantis,” he told Maher, “is I didn’t feel my party was doing enough.”
He built the whole thing out from there. Republicans were on a “banning binge.” His party was frozen with “timidity.” And so Newsom stepped into the arena. He went to the red states. He ran the ads. He showed up on Fox News and debated Ron DeSantis on the man’s home turf.
It was a tidy origin story for a presidential frontrunner — the Democrat who showed up when nobody else would.
The amount of lying Gavin Newsom does to Bill Maher is staggering, but my favorite part is that he says he “took on Ron DeSantis,” by which I guess he means he was humiliated in their debate when DeSantis showed what’s happened to San Francisco on Newsom’s watch pic.twitter.com/yew26wwOrp
— Ian Miller (@ianmSC) May 2, 2026
Except Ron DeSantis has been telling a very different story about that night. And his version comes with receipts.
‘Shut It Down’
Six weeks before Newsom sat down with Maher, DeSantis appeared on Sean Hannity’s podcast and walked through what happened after the cameras cut to commercial on that November 2023 debate stage in Alpharetta, Georgia.
The debate had run past its scheduled 90 minutes. Both governors agreed to keep going. Newsom, on the live broadcast, told Hannity, “Let’s just do an extended hour. I’m happy to do it.” Hannity teased the continuation to millions of viewers. They went to break.
Then, according to DeSantis, it all fell apart.
“He got the hook from, I think, his wife and some of his staff,” DeSantis said. Hannity filled in the rest: “They ran out into the studio. ‘You’re done.'”
DeSantis said he was just sitting there. “I didn’t know what to do.”
DeSantis recently told the story about Newsom getting “the hook” from his wife and staffers, ending their debate.
That’s how well it was going for Gavin, who is now bragging about it. https://t.co/sq8KrNc53K pic.twitter.com/ugmCcIspZ7
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) May 2, 2026
When Hannity came back on the air, both governors had vanished. The host told viewers they had “other commitments.”
The Part Newsom Doesn’t Bring Up
What makes DeSantis’s account difficult to dismiss is that it didn’t start with DeSantis. NBC News reported the backstage confrontation in real time in December 2023, citing five sources — four from DeSantis’s camp and one person unaffiliated with either campaign. According to those sources, Newsom’s wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, entered the debate room during commercial breaks on at least two occasions to raise objections. After both governors agreed on live television to extend the debate, she walked to the stage and shut it down. The unaffiliated source confirmed she said, “We’re done.”
CBS News and Politico independently reported the same account.
DeSantis’s communications director Andrew Romeo didn’t mince words at the time: “Gavin Newsom got beat so badly last night his wife literally had to throw in the towel for him.”
And then there’s the detail that apparently triggered it all. DeSantis told Hannity that during the first commercial break, he walked backstage to use the restroom and heard Newsom’s staffers “hissing” at him as he passed. The reason? Moments earlier, DeSantis had mentioned Newsom’s father-in-law on air, claiming the man told him personally that he left California for Florida because it was better governed.
A Newsom aide pushed back on the narrative, telling reporters the decision to end the debate was mutual. Both campaigns, the aide said, had complained to Fox producers when Hannity tried to extend past the agreed time. Newsom himself told reporters afterward, “I think everybody started panicking on both sides.”
But that explanation has to compete with what Newsom said on the live broadcast minutes before his team ended it: “Let’s just do an extended hour. I’m happy to do it.”
The Fighter Who Got Pulled From the Fight
Newsom is building something. The memoir is on shelves. The podcast launched last year. He’s polling as the Democratic frontrunner. And the story he keeps telling is that he’s the one who will show up.
On Friday, sitting across from Maher, he described the DeSantis debate as the night he proved it — the night he stepped forward while his party stood still.
Five sources, the moderator, and the man standing at the other podium say that night ended with Newsom’s wife walking onto a stage during a commercial break and telling everyone it was over.
He’s running on the night he got the hook.