California Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to run for President, and the easiest way to build credibility with the left-wing base is to tear into President Trump.

But Newsom’s plan backfired.

And Newsom ended up humiliating himself by making this bad mistake.

The Post That Blew Up in Newsom’s Face

On his X account, Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, shared a post reporting that US homes are “now the most unaffordable in history,” along with a graph showing the income needed to qualify for a median-priced home from 2005 to 2026.

The governor wanted readers to blame Trump. The graph had other ideas.

Several X users pointed out that although the chart reached its highest level during Trump’s second administration, it shows a substantial increase between 2021 and 2024, when former President Joe Biden was in office. That’s the part Newsom apparently expected people to ignore.

He expected wrong.

The Libs of TikTok account asked, “Hey @GavinNewsom, who was president during the biggest uptick in home unaffordability?”

That’s a short question that requires only three letters to answer: J-O-E.

Meteorologist Chris Martz wrote, “Evidently, @GavinNewsom doesn’t know how to read graphs. Housing prices skyrocketed under Joe Biden’s presidency.”

OutKick writer Ian Miller piled on: “California is the most unaffordable state in the country to buy a house, and it’s only gotten worse since Gavin Newsom took over. And no one in the media will call him out for saying this.”

That last part stings, because it’s true. The mainstream press corps that would torch a Republican governor for this kind of self-defeating post gave Newsom a much longer runway.

California Post opinion editor Joel Pollak wrote, “You would be ashamed if they broke it down by state.” That’s a separate problem entirely for a governor whose state has become a national cautionary tale on housing policy, but the point still lands.

Actor Doug Davidson commented, “Gavin, I guess you can’t read a graph. The biggest spike was before DJT took office.”

Author Jens Heycke joked, “Aspiring presidential candidate Gavin Newsom demonstrates that he is unable to read a simple graph. This level of numeric and economic illiteracy is disqualifying.”

Disqualifying. That’s a word worth sitting with for a moment, given where Newsom clearly wants to go next.

What the White House Had to Say

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told Fox News Digital that Trump is more “laser-focused” on affordability than the “incompetent” Newsom. “Unlike incompetent Governor Gavin Newscum, President Trump has been laser-focused on making housing more affordable. The president signed an executive order prohibiting large Wall Street firms from purchasing single-family homes, directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase $200 billion in mortgage bonds that helped drive rates to four-year lows and cut unnecessary red tape at a historic pace to boost supply, speed construction, and lower costs,” Ingle said.

“The President will not stop fighting until the American Dream of homeownership is within reach for every American, which is why he continues to sign bold new executive orders and calls on Congress to pass further legislation,” he added.

That’s an actual record of action. Newsom’s contribution to the housing debate was posting a graph that indicted his own party’s four years in the White House.

And Fox News Digital reached out to Newsom’s office for comment. It did not immediately receive a response. Shocking.

What This Moment Really Tells You About Newsom’s 2028 Ambitions

There’s a pattern worth noting here, and it goes well beyond a single bad post on X.

This same kind of self-defeating chart problem surfaced before. Other users compared Newsom’s post to a since-deleted X post from the official Democrat Party’s account featuring a graph claiming that “US Grocery Prices Reached Record Highs in 2025” with prices “higher today than they were on July 2024” in categories such as dairy, produce and meat. At the time, users pointed out that the graph, in fact, showed prices skyrocketing in 2021, when Biden was president, and only leveling off at the end of 2024 when Trump was re-elected.

So this isn’t a fluke. It’s a habit. Democrat politicians and the party apparatus keep reaching for charts that supposedly indict Trump, and those charts keep showing the same thing — the damage happened while Biden held the keys.

The Federal Reserve’s prolonged cheap-money policies helped create the conditions for the inflation that followed. Massive money creation during the Biden years poured fuel on housing costs specifically, driving up demand and prices in a market that couldn’t build fast enough to respond. That’s not a Republican talking point — it’s visible in every graph Democrats keep accidentally sharing.

But Newsom isn’t really interested in getting the economics right. He’s interested in positioning himself for a national run. The housing post wasn’t a policy argument. It was an audition, and it crashed during the first act.

Newsom’s post came as the California governor has been working to tackle housing affordability in his state. In 2025, he signed into law a housing package to exempt certain projects from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and streamline environmental review processes. That’s at least a real policy move, whatever one thinks of the particulars. But signing a bill in Sacramento doesn’t explain away four years of Biden-era cost explosions that Newsom’s own chart put on full display.

California sits as the most expensive housing market in the country. Newsom has governed that state for years. The idea that he gets to ride into a presidential primary campaign swinging charts about national housing unaffordability, while presiding over the single worst state for home buyers, requires a level of audacity that borders on performance art.

And the 2028 presidential angle makes this more significant, not less. Every Democrat who watched Joe Biden’s cognitive decline get concealed through years of managed messaging and strategic image control is now watching Newsom run the same kind of play — attack Trump with data, hope nobody reads the fine print, count on friendly press not to ask the obvious follow-up questions.

It didn’t work for Biden’s team in the end. The debate meltdown exposed what the inner circle already knew. Something similar tends to happen to politicians who build entire narratives on the assumption that voters won’t look too closely at the actual numbers.

Voters in 2028 who look at a housing affordability chart will see the same thing X users saw the moment Newsom posted his: the line went nearly vertical starting in 2021, held high through 2024, and the name attached to that era is Biden’s — not Trump’s.

That’s not an opinion. It’s what the graph shows. Newsom’s graph. The one he put on the internet himself.

Source: Fox News Digital, “Gavin Newsom blames Trump for housing costs using chart showing massive increase under Biden”