It is not that people are finally waking up to Gavin Newsom’s California. Highest gas prices in the country. Worst homeless crisis in America. Drug tourism. Sanctuary state. A high-speed rail that eats billions and goes nowhere. Highest taxes. Waste. Fraud. Abuse. He looks TERRIBLE because of all of that. I have watched it first hand. I live here. That is not what this is about. This is about people finally waking up to what kind of MAN he is. I already know the first reply. But, but, but, but… Trump. Every. Single. Time. Not because the comparison holds. Because a certain kind of reader cannot talk about a Democrat without dragging Donald Trump into the room. Every. Single. Time. Clinton cheated. Trump cheated. Powerful men cheat. I am not pretending otherwise. If your whole argument is “but Trump,” you are not answering what Newsom did to Alex Tourk. You are diagnosing yourself with TDS. A lot of men have had affairs. Most men have not done THIS. For something like ten months, Gavin Newsom, then the mayor of San Francisco, was sleeping with Ruby Rippey. Wife of Alex Tourk. New mother. Alcoholic trying to stay sober. She worked for him. He put her outside his office. Tourk was not a guy he waved at in a hallway. He was his deputy chief of staff. Then his campaign manager. His BEST FRIEND. The man in the next office. The man Newsom saw EVERY SINGLE DAY. Fist bump. Hey bro. How about that Niners game. Looked him in the eye. Meetings. Cars. City Hall. Same as always. WHILE HE WAS SLEEPING WITH HIS BEST FRIEND’S WIFE. That is the part that should make your skin crawl. Not the sex. The mornings after. The handshake. The smile. In July, Rippey finally wrote it down in Vanity Fair. She does not write it as a romance. She takes a pile of the blame, which is more than Newsom has ever given this story. She also names the thing he will never name. Power does not need to coerce. It only needs to exist. Newsom’s version in the memoir is small and flattering. “The stupidest and also briefest of affairs.” She was the last to leave a party. Then, in his telling, he “came clean” to Tourk. Rippey says that last bit is the detail that stays with her. It reads like he stole credit for a confession she had already made. There is no mystery about whether it happened. He admitted it in 2007. On camera. City Hall. “Everything you’ve heard and read is true.” What he wanted in the book was a softer version. Shorter. Cleaner. Him as the guy who told the truth. She says it was her. Before it started, at a Mexican restaurant, sitting there with her husband, he looked at a woman who had just had a baby and told her she looked good, that she'd lost all the pregnancy weight. Awkward laugh around the table. She writes that she suddenly wanted her husband’s margarita. Then it starts. Again and again and again. Russian Hill penthouse. A back room in North Beach. A hotel in Los Angeles. She comes to him. They drink. There is sex. She says the sex is not even the point. The point is the hit. The text. The look across the marble hallway at City Hall. It is not long after Newsom starts “dating” her that she “coincidentally” develops a cocaine habit. She writes that cocaine did not do much on its own. After a bottle or two of wine it let her drink twice as much, twice as long. One night she is in his king-size bed watching him on all fours, scrubbing red wine out of his precious carpet that she had spilt. He is furious. That is when the moral awakening arrives. We really can’t do this anymore. YOU can’t be doing this to Alex. Not in the office. Not in the car. Not on the mornings he looked his BEST FRIEND in the eye and asked about the game. When she stained his precious rug. The rug he cared about more than his best friend’s wife. She had a one-year-old at home. Newsom’s presidential odds are not falling because California is a mess. They are falling because almost no man could do that to his best friend for TEN MONTHS... and then write it down as brief and stupid. And because the women who read Rippey can see exactly how he handled her. That is not a policy disagreement. That is the record of a man who can look you in the eye and lie to you again and again and again while he tells you he cares about you. Americans are catching up. That is why the odds are dropping. That is why his own party is backing away. That is why he does not get the White House.