Three major wildfires were burning across Southern California this week, at least ten homes had been destroyed in San Juan Capistrano, and additional structures were threatened near Camp Pendleton and in Malibu. And according to American Thinker columnist Monica Showalter, Gov. Gavin Newsom was nowhere near any of it — he was in New Hampshire, taking reporter questions.
Showalter’s October 18 piece, headlined “Gavin Newsom goes AWOL as California burns,” opens with a line that sets the tone for everything after it: “Nero is fiddling in New Hampshire while California burns.” It is an opinion column, and it reads like one — a sustained, blunt indictment of the governor’s priorities rather than a straight news account. But the factual scaffolding beneath the argument is worth laying out, because it captures a familiar political dynamic in a state that has spent much of the past decade watching fire season collide with campaign season.
The fires, and the questions that follow them
Showalter describes blazes driven by hot Santa Ana winds and temperatures around 100 degrees, with the destruction in San Juan Capistrano already confirmed and other communities bracing. Her piece doesn’t dwell on containment figures or evacuation orders. Instead, it pivots quickly to a set of questions she says the governor should be answering: whether brush was cleared as the state endured what she calls “an absolute dearth of rain since February,” whether reservoirs were filled, and whether there are enough firefighters to go around.
Her answer to all three is an emphatic no. She attributes the brush situation to what she characterizes as a recent Newsom policy adopted “in the name of saving the earth or something,” and argues that the result — homes sitting in the path of fast-moving fires — was entirely foreseeable. That’s a contested policy claim the column asserts rather than documents, but it’s central to her case: the governor’s absence, in her framing, isn’t just a scheduling choice, it’s a symptom of a broader pattern of preparation deferred and responsibility deflected.
She anticipates the counterarguments, too. “Global warming” and “Trump did it” are pre-emptively dismissed as answers she won’t accept from Sacramento. The implicit challenge is that the state’s wildfire problem is at least partly a management problem, and that management problems have owners.
Where the governor was, and why it mattered to the column
The specific grievance is that Newsom was fielding press questions in New Hampshire about his ex-wife, who Showalter says was recently ousted from her post as ambassador to Greece. The governor, per the column, presented himself as having no opinion on the matter — which Showalter reads as evidence of a “non-disparagement clause” at work. It’s a wry aside, but it serves her larger point: the governor was available to the press on a personal-adjacent topic in a key early nominating state, and unavailable to the press on wildfires back home.
What she wants, she writes, is for Newsom to be on the ground supporting firefighters working in triple-digit heat — or, more importantly, taking questions about why the state keeps finding itself unprepared for each new conflagration. Instead, she concludes, “He’s out campaigning while California burns.”
The column also borrows a line from actor James Woods, who posted that the “feckless governor” was off “flapping his gums in another state,” and closes with a quote attributed to legal scholar Jonathan Turley: “Newsom is Nero without the musical talent.” Showalter calls it “brutally accurate.” The Nero comparison, invoked in the piece’s opening line and revived at its end, is doing real work here — it’s the column’s thesis in miniature, the idea of a leader whose attention is fixed elsewhere while his state is in crisis.
A broader indictment, folded into a fire story
Showalter doesn’t stop at the fires. The back half of the piece widens into a general case against California’s political direction, and it’s here that the column reads most clearly as a partisan broadside rather than a narrow critique of emergency response.
She cites a lawsuit by the Trump administration over the state’s voter rolls, and says Tulane County has reported mass duplicate ballots being mailed — another “mistake,” in her telling, that officials somehow can’t stop making. (The column’s reference is to “Tulane County”; readers will note California has no county by that name, and the piece does not clarify which jurisdiction it means. Tulare County is a California county; Tulane is a university in New Orleans.) She argues that the state is “a mess,” that taxpayers are being hurt by what she calls the governor’s negligence and “convenient absence,” and that his real priority is campaigning for his next job — the behavior, she writes, of “a firm believer in failing upward.”
There’s also a dig at the electorate: “foolish people out here who just keep on voting for Democrats,” though she concedes that not many of them are “homeowners literally in the line of fire.” It’s the column’s sharpest turn, and its most revealing — the argument isn’t only that Newsom has failed, but that voters have enabled the failure.
What the column is, and what it isn’t
It’s worth being clear about the genre. American Thinker is an opinion outlet, and Showalter is a columnist writing a commentary piece, not a reporter working sources on a fire line. The column does not include incident command briefings, acreage totals, containment percentages, or statements from Cal Fire or the governor’s office. Its factual claims about the fires — three major blazes, ten homes lost in San Juan Capistrano, threats in Camp Pendleton and Malibu, Santa Ana winds and 100-degree heat — are presented without attribution to a specific agency, and its policy claims about brush clearance and reservoir levels are asserted rather than sourced.
What the piece does offer is a clean articulation of a critique that has followed Newsom for years: that the governor’s national ambitions and the state’s perennial emergencies exist in tension, and that he resolves that tension by leaving. Whether that’s fair is a judgment call. The column’s own answer is unambiguous. “What a monstrous governor,” Showalter writes, and she doesn’t leave much room for doubt about where she stands.
For readers trying to separate the argument from the anger, the useful takeaway is this: the fires are real, the destruction in San Juan Capistrano is real, and the political fight over who bears responsibility for California’s fire readiness is very much live. Showalter has picked a side in that fight, and she’s picked it loudly.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/gavin-newsom-goes-awol-as-california-burns/