Why Elon Musk is right to leave California

Not long before Joe Biden finally accepted defeat, Gavin Newsom, the 56-year-old governor of California, was on the stump for him in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, shirt undone two daring buttons, sleeves rolled up, silver hair gelled just so.

Newsom, who is now being mentioned as Kamala Harris’s running mate, models himself on Bill Clinton. People who’ve worked with him say he practises Clintonian gestures in the mirror, though the look he’s achieved is more Harley Street gynaecologist.

‘If Donald Trump succeeds, God help us, we will roll back the last half-century,’ Newsom told the Pennsylvania crowd. ‘It’s America in reverse. They want to bring us back to a pre-1960s world and you are the front line of that opposition. Voting rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights…’

We can look forward to months of this, and from Harris too: Trump as a slump backwards into the toxic past, Democrats as the party of progress. And it’s amazing how many people, even those here who’d call themselves Conservatives, agree. They simply take it for granted that no one sensible, no one educated could vote for Trump.

But what I’d like to ask them is this: if Trump is backwards, what is forwards? Where is the party of sanity leading you? It’s my feeling that if people really understood the direction of travel,Trump might not look like such an obviously ludicrous choice.

Newsom is mesmerisingly, nakedly consumed by vanity. Like Harris, he seems to go with any political flow, which is why the bills he’s signed as governor act so well as signposts, pointing to a destination.

Last year Newsom signed Assembly Bill 665, which had the noble-sounding aim of ‘increasing mental healthcare access for low-income youth’. What this meant in reality was that children of just 12 who have been persuaded by their peers or by TikTok that they’re trapped in the wrong body can take ‘refuge’ in government-affiliated residential shelters.