Fact Check Time: Gavin Newsom did not push to remove Donald Trump from the California ballot.
Key Point: Following a paper earlier this month by a pair of conservative law professors that argued Donald Trump is not eligible to be president, that claim has been spreading. But contrary to several untrustworthy social media accounts, neither Gavin Newsom nor any other governor has taken up that cause.
Gavin Newsom vs. Donald Trump?
Earlier this month, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, a pair of conservative law professors who are associated with the Federal Society, wrote a paper arguing that former President Donald Trump, due to his participation in an act of insurrection, should not be eligible to become president again.
“Trump’s deliberate inaction renders his January 6 speech much more incriminating in hindsight, because it makes it even less plausible (if it was ever plausible) that the crowd’s reaction was all a big mistake or misunderstanding,” the two professors wrote.
This week, The Atlantic ran a piece by two other legal titans, Laurence Tribe and J. Michael Luttig. Tribe is a liberal and Luttig a conservative, but both are Trump critics, and they agreed that Trump should be disqualified.
It’s not certain how, exactly, Trump would be disqualified. Still, the article by Maude and Paulsen suggests that “state bodies or officers are obliged, often by oath—sometimes by oath mandated by the U.S. Constitution— to act consistently with the requirements of the Constitution in the discharge of their duties… Accordingly, such state actors can and must apply Section Three’s disqualification in carrying out their state-law responsibilities—just as they possess the authority and duty to comply with and enforce the Constitution’s other qualification-for-office requirements.”
Since this debate began, no governor has indicated that they plan to disqualify Trump under that legal theory.
Social Media Goes Wild
But in what I would consider an alternate universe of low-value social media accounts, one already has.
“BREAKING NEWS: FOX News reports Ca. Gov. Gavin Newsom is the first Governor to say Donald Trump is not eligible for future presidential elections & has asked the California’s State Assembly to pass a bill that will remove Trumps name on any future ballots,” an account called Quotedigger posted on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. The note had 5,784 reposts within two days.
Many other accounts — including prominent anti-vax doctor Robert Malone and anti-Trump ones with names called “BlueForce” – have recycled the story.
Richard Grenell, who served as acting director of national intelligence in the Trump Administration, shared the message, declaring that “Fascist @GavinNewsom is afraid of dissent. So he shuts it down, cancels it and tries to eliminate anyone or anything that doesn’t agree with him.”
The problem is, it’s not true. As far as we can tell after research the claimed, Gavin Newsom has not declared Trump not eligible or asked the State Assembly to disqualify him, nor has Fox News reported that he has.
None of the tweets offer a link to any such news story at Fox or elsewhere. In fact, the original tweet does not link to any story on this at all. A search of the Fox News archive shows nothing like such a story that we can see.
Gavin Newsom may be a prominent Trump critic, to the point where many feel like he’s running for president already, but he has not taken the step of trying to get Trump tossed from his state’s ballot.
The story is not a misunderstanding of some real news story that’s been misinterpreted. I would argue it seems made up, out of whole cloth, and helped along by fact-checking standards at the former Twitter that frayed to near-nonexistence. One version of the tweet features a community note — stating that “Fox News has not reported this, and there is no reporting from any news outlet that Newsom made any such statement” — but the others do not.
Newsom, in recent days, has been dealing mostly with the arrival of Hurricane Hilary in his state and has made no statements about ballot access for the former president. He also sent a fundraising email this week about his proposal for a “Constitutional Convention on Guns.”
“Convening a constitutional convention requires 34 state legislatures to call for this. It starts with one, and California will be the first,” he said in the email. “Will finding 33 more states calling to amend the Constitution be easy? No, of course not, I am clear-eyed about that…From there, my promise to you is we are working, and will continue to work, with other states to grow that number.”
Author Expertise and Experience
Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Stephen has authored thousands of articles over the years that focus on politics, technology, and the economy for over a decade. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
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