Dana Bash was disappointed that Gavin Newsom chose not to correct Steve Bannon’s comments on the 2020 Presidential Election during his new podcast.
The CNN host pointed to the latest episode of the California governor’s new podcast where he welcomed Bannon – briefly a strategist in Donald Trump’s first term and now a major voice for the far right – to discuss a variety of topics. One of them being how the right handled Trump’s loss, which Bannon denied happened and Newsom didn’t correct.
“I listened to the whole thing. It was very substantive, a really interesting conversation,” Bash said. “When Steve Bannon says the election was stolen and the governor, the Democratic governor of California, the fifth largest economy in the world, does not correct him on that. That surprised me.”
Bannon casually snuck in his continued belief that Trump didn’t actually lose the 2020 election to Joe Biden. Rather than fact check his guest, Newsom said he “appreciated the notion of agency” the right showed in the aftermath.
“I think that’s a lesson that we learned after President Trump,” Bannon said. “And look, you know, we disagree on this, but President Trump won the 2020 election. And we were kind of shattered as a movement when he left Washington, D.C. And we had to go back to basics to say, you know, it can’t be somebody else do something. You know, we had to do something. And that’s where we went back to really a pure populist movement to go with the grassroots, the precinct strategy, and kind of rebuild ourselves from there.”
Newsom responded, “I appreciate the notion of agency that we’re not bystanders in the world. It’s decisions, not conditions, that determine our fate and future.”
This is not the first time the governor’s new podcast side hustle made headlines. The previous episode featured a long conversation with Charlie Kirk where Newsom said he sees Kirk “flooding the zone” with a steady diet of clips, campus visits and other moves to win over voters, and feels that is the winning formula.
“And then I’m thinking about we’re going to stand back and watch you run circles around us for six months, the next two or three years, waiting for the moment to finally strike?” he added. “It struck me as not necessarily the best advice.”
Watch Bash’s full clip above.
