Gavin Newsom sat down on Real Time with Bill Maher Friday night to promote his new memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery.” The book is a 304-page case for why the California governor is not the privileged, Getty-connected political product his critics say he is. The sales pitch is authenticity.
Within minutes, Maher was telling him he sounds exactly like Donald Trump.
The Mirror He Didn’t Ask For
Newsom opened the interview by condemning the political climate following the alleged assassination attempt on Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He called the current moment “the sewer we’re now living in because of Donald Trump.”
Then Maher turned it around. He told Newsom he’s the one imitating Trump’s style with the trolling. And now he’s suing Fox News.
Newsom’s $787 million defamation lawsuit against the network — filed in June 2025 over Fox’s coverage of a phone call with Trump — cleared an early hurdle the day before the interview, when a Delaware judge allowed the case to move forward. Newsom arrived at Maher’s desk riding that ruling.
Maher asked how suing a media outlet differs from what Trump has done to ABC News and CBS. Newsom told Maher that Fox should settle or apologize. Maher said that sounds exactly like Trump. Newsom said the answer is simple: don’t defame, don’t lie. Maher said it again: that sounds like him.
He said it three times.
The Confession Chair
This was Newsom’s third appearance on Maher in roughly a year.
In March 2025, Newsom sat in that same chair and called his own party’s brand “toxic,” citing a CNN poll that put Democratic favorability at 29 percent. When Maher pressed him on a law about whether schools must notify parents about a child’s gender identity, Newsom described teachers who do notify parents as “snitches.”
He didn’t plan to say any of that. Maher asked, and Newsom answered.
By November 2025, Maher was telling his audience that Newsom was “too far left” for his taste, and that his moves toward the center weren’t enough. Newsom kept coming back.
Friday night was the biggest admission yet. Newsom told Maher that his trolling of Trump on social media is deliberate — that he’s “trying to put a mirror up to Donald Trump.” He complained that Fox News criticized his posts as “unbecoming” while showing no awareness that their preferred candidate has been doing the same thing for years.
Then Maher asked whether there was anything Newsom would say California went too far left on. Newsom wasn’t going to bring it up himself. Maher made him answer.
Newsom pointed to COVID, specifically shutting down beaches and keeping schools closed for too long. He pointed to housing and homelessness, saying he could have acted more aggressively sooner. And when Maher pressed on social issues, Newsom volunteered his position on transgender athletes in women’s sports, calling it “common sense” and adding, “I just think it’s not being transphobic.”
The Book That Proves the Opposite
He came on the show to sell a memoir whose entire purpose is to separate the real Gavin Newsom from the caricature.
The New Republic called it a book that does “the worst job imaginable” of proving he’s not the preening elite his haters say he is, and counted 61 separate page references to the Getty family across 270 pages of main text. Current Affairs titled its review “A Hollow Man in a Hurry.” Jacobin concluded that the memoir proves the opposite of what it claims. One reviewer counted the vacations, the safari with a famous paleontologist, the week with the King of Spain.
Newsom writes in the memoir that his “deeper entry into the Getty world” would rob him of his own story, and that correcting this narrative was one of his reasons for writing the book. He describes his paper route, his mother’s sacrifices, his struggles reading from a teleprompter.
Then he appeared on national television and spent 15 minutes confirming exactly the image he wrote 304 pages to escape.
The Pattern Newsom Can’t See
Toward the end of the exchange about the Fox lawsuit, Newsom told Maher that Fox News has “no situational awareness” about the fact that Trump has been suing media and trolling opponents for years.
Every Maher appearance, Newsom arrives selling one version of himself and leaves having revealed another.
The memoir was supposed to be the definitive version of the story he wants people to believe. Maher’s chair keeps telling a different one.