‘The Daily Show’ highlights Gavin Newsom’s affair, failures in new segment

Gavin Newsom is the latest figure to be promoted by “The Daily Show” in a new episode of the “Daily Showography” series – which follows the California governor’s personal and political scandals. The seven-minute segment will air as part of Wednesday night’s broadcast of the Comedy Central talk show.

Presented as a “for your consideration” spot during awards season, the satirical biography praises Newsom as a “leading man” who is “now playing select venues but preparing for national release” — a reference to the likelihood of his 2028 presidential bid.

The segment’s narrator pokes fun at Newsom’s “classic rags to riches story” — quoting the governor, “My dad, his best friends in the world were some of the richest families in the world” — before joking, “Fine, he’s a nepo baby, but so is Dakota Johnson and we love her.”

“The Daily Show” then chronicles Newsom’s post-college years, when he started a wine company “with nothing but his guts, his refined tastes and the financial backing of an oil magnate.” The snarky narrator says: “Things were finally starting to go well for this tall, handsome, athletic, well-connected young man.”

Newsom then took on “his biggest role yet” as mayor of San Francisco. “The Daily Show” acknowledges Newsom’s role in promoting the legalization of gay marriage while at the same time accusing him of having an affair with the wife of one of his staffers.

Most of all, the “biofilm” mocks Newsom for his failure to end California’s homelessness crisis or build a high-speed rail line from San Francisco to Los Angeles. In the video, Newsom is cut again and again — from 2010 to 2025 — promising to solve these persistent problems. (A fast train connecting the state’s two largest cities is still an illusion, with Newsom recently bragging about building a rail line in Central California. “Soon, this futuristic bullet train will take people from booming downtown Merced all the way to the shining metropolis of Bakersfield,” the narrator jokes.)

Of course, no Newsom piece would be complete without mentioning his pandemic setbacks, including the French Laundry scandal and the recall election. “The Daily Show” has an idea why Newsom was ultimately re-elected: “Luckily the COVID vaccine meant he could show his full face again, so he won easily.”

The segment ends with Newsom’s ascension to a frontrunner position in 2028, asking viewers to “consider Gavin Newsom: a Christian Bale type who’s ready for the screen… he’s more than a politician; he’s a leading man.”

“The Daily Showography” has also produced segments focusing on Joe Rogan, Jeff Bezos, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Marco Rubio and Vladimir Putin. The Comedy Central program received two Emmy nominations this year for editing a segment into a variety show – for the episodes about Stephen Miller and Kamala Harris.

Watch “Gavin Newsom’s Daily Showography: Leading Man for Your Consideration” below.