Hal Brown's Substack (fomerly Hal Brown's Blog): Gavin Newsom

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November 5, 2025

A Two Act Substack: 1) If Trump's presidency was a TV series it would have jumped the shark and been cancelled a long time ago. 2) Newsom warns about Trump sending in his own sharks. By Hal M. Brown

Introduction

When I wrote this Tuesday morning I wasn’t thinking about the election. I had no intention to write about it. I assumed the Democrats would win all the elections, but not by the margins they did. I didn’t even think about the speeches and certainly had no idea the four speeches would be extraordinary. Not only that, I didn’t know they’d be given in a sequence that couldn’t have been more impactful if this all been planned in advance by a master screeenwriter.

Thus as things turned out my intended Substack pre-written for Wednesday had to be amended and the title changed. It is now 1:00 AM so this can officially be my Wednesday Substack. Now it’s time for me to put both myself and the Substack to bed.

Act One: If Trump’s presidency was a TV series it would have jumped the shark and been cancelled a long time ago.

Written Election Morning

Fonzie jumped the shark in the fifth season of “Happy Days,” specifically in the episode titled “Hollywood: Part 3,” which aired in the third season of Happy Days on September 20, 1977. The show aired on ABC from January 15, 1974, to July 19, 1984, with a total of 255 half-hour episodes spanning 11 seasons. Obviously the term “jumping the shark” applied to a TV series having an episode so implausible that people would stop watching didn’t apply to Happy Days.

Click footnote to see our recent jump the shark show > 1

What made me think of this was this text message:

It would be exhausting to enumerate all of the things Trump has done in the last month that if this was TV series about a president critics would say it jumped the shark. Ripping down the East Wing and his Gatsby gala held while he was cutting SNAP benefits come to mind as recent shark jumping episodes. Just Sunday his telling Norah O’Donnell he didn’t know anything about the convicted crypto criminal he pardoned should have been a shark jumper.

Of course Trump actually was in a TV series where he was the host and so-called star for 14 seasons. I never watched or followed news about it, so I don’t know from experience if they ever had one or more episodes which critics said jumped the shark. This is what an AI inquiry said to the question:

Yes, many viewers and critics believe that “The Apprentice” jumped the shark, particularly during its later seasons when the show’s quality declined and decisions made by the host, Donald Trump, seemed arbitrary. This sentiment was echoed by former contestants and commentators who noted that the show’s format became less engaging over time.

This all brings us to the question upon which the fate of our democracy rests: what will constitute a show ending shark jump. for Trump?

My impression is that he has the uncanny, one might say superhuman, ability to come away unscathed from jumping over sharks. He genuinely seems to enjoy sticking it to his critics by pushing the limits and giving them the finger.

Act Two: Newsom warns about Trump sending in his own sharks.

Written after Midnight and posted on Wednesday at 1:00AM

The returns came in. The Democrats had a resounding victory. I anticipated their winning but not in a blow-out.

Then there were the extraordinary speeches by the gubernatorial candidates, Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill followed by the barnburner Zohran Mamdani.

It was the evening capper speech by Gavin Newsom that threw ice water on my feeling elated and replaced it with a chill of dread.

Unbeknownst to me the AI illustration I used to conclude Chapter One was appropriate.

Here’s Gavin Newsom closing out the evening with his speech about the Prop. 50 win which passed overwhelmingly:

To say that the speech was sobering is putting it mildly. Newsom warned about Trump’s desire and intention to declare war on the cities and described how Trump had already sent troops to his city of Los Angeles and my city of Portland, as well as to Chicago. He described Trump mounting a shock and awe campaign against our big cities.

Continuing with the theme of sharks, what Newsom was portending was Trump’s not just riding voracious sharks while giving us the finger, but commanding armed sharks to take over our cities.

Mamdani concluded his remarks saying, “so Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up!”

I envision Trump, assuming he was watching, reacting to be addressed directly with this aggressive challenge by raging out loud “I’ll show how I can turn the volume up on you and your city mo-fukker!” This is all we know about how Trump reacted when the final results were announced:

If Trump even looked at HUFFPOST this morning, I doubt he’d appreciate the clever main all caps italicized title in red letters:

Afterthought:

It occurred to me that New York City, with it’s new mayor, has a police force of about 33,000 officers. Los Angeles, the nation’s second largest city, has about 9,000 police officers. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department employs approximately 10,000 sworn deputies. Therefore Trump and his Gestapo/SS advisors might think twice about daring the new mayor to try to thwart an attempt to militarize the city. New York City police offciers, like other New York public employees, take an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of New York, pledging to faithfully discharge their duties to the best of their ability. They do not take an oath to Donald Trump.

When they salute superior officers they do not say “heil” to anybody either.

Addendum: Los Angeles is approximately 1,215 square kilometers, making it about 56% larger than New York City, which covers around 781 square kilometers. Los Angeles is about 1.6 times bigger than New York City. Thus LA has a much larger area than New York City to police with far fewer officers.

Update:

I watched Trump this morning as he addressed GOP members of Congress looking for any indications of stress. I didn’t see any. He looked relaxed and sounded cheerful.

However Trump felt watching the election results and speeches he brushed off any anger and rallied for his morning TV show. Nothing, nothing mind you, will allow him to feel he’s jumped the shark.

Trump, being Trump, bragged about meeting the head of Toyota saying he’d asked him how much stock in the company. He said he was told 90.1%. Trump joked “he said point one” and added he told the Japanese industrialist who is about to invest billions in the United States “you must be really rich.’ Who says things like this? Need anyone ask?

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October 19, 2025

If a Substack falls into cyberspace and nobody reads it, is it really there? What I learned from an X tweet about Pam Bondi that had over 58,000 vists after Gavin Newsom quoted it. By Hal M. Brown

Okay, this Sunday afternoon post is an indulgence and a bit of self-promotion. It is about a missed opportunity I had to, putting it bluntly, get more people to subscribe to my Substack. My title here is, of course, a version of the well known philosophical question “if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” It can be answered differently depending on how one defines sound. It could be a physical event like a tree falling or something you percieve like the message of a Substack.

I am writing this as a follow-up to an addendum I posted on this morning’s Substack under the topic:

This is what I posted:

I just came across this from something I posted on Twitter in August:

I don’t know how Gov. Newsom found it. It was in response to my tweet:

Amazingly over 58,000 people viewed it. I rarely post on X. I never looked at how many people viewed that tweet.

Here are the replies to the X tweet from August.

This may not seem like a lot, but it is probably a record number for anything I ever tweeted.

While I was really pleased so many people saw my image and that Gavin Newsom was one of them, and of course that he saw fit to quote it with his own comment, I wish in retrospect that I’d included this magic link:

I have no way of knowing how many, if any, new subcribers, and eventually how many regular readers I would have gotten if I’d done this. After all, of 58,000 people who saw my tweet I’d assume a few of them would have been curious enough to check it out and maybe liked what they saw enough to both subscribe and read what I wrote on a regular basis. Who knows? I may have gotten 10 regular readers, 100, or none. Since many people subscribe to 50, 100, or more Substacks I doubt they read them all.

Looking back, had I known how many people, including Gov. Newsom, would have seen that tweet I would have done a better job with the illustration of Pam Bondi. For one thing I would have used the hat from a real Washington, DC police chief instead of a regular police officers hat.

I might have embellished her jacket with a badge too.

After all, why not? If anyone is full of themselves it is Chief Pam Bondi. If she decided to wear a unform it might look like these:

The Honorable Pamela Jo Bondi, the U.S. Attorney General who is the chief law enforcement officer of the federal government and who oversees the Department of Justice which includes the FBI, and who also serve as the principal legal advisor to the President of the United States, hasn’t gotten my attention since she visted my (supposedly burning) city of Portland earlier this month and afterwards said “I was in Portland and had the chance to visit with the governor of Oregon and also the mayor there in town, and they are absolutely covering up the terrorism that is hitting their streets.”

Who knows what tomrrow will bring? She competes with Pete Hegseth, who actually has a much larger contingent of people with guns he can order around, for the limelight so it’s anybody’s guess what she’ll do to outdo the guy who can bomb boats in the Caribbean.