Gavin Newsom wrote a memoir. Then he used his own political action committee to buy 67,000 copies of it. Then he counted those copies as sales. Then he called himself a bestselling author. Then — and this is the part where you’re supposed to keep a straight face — he offered “free” copies to anyone who donated to the PAC, which is how the PAC justified spending $1,561,875 on a book nobody was buying in bookstores.
Ladies and gentlemen: the next Democratic presidential frontrunner.
The FEC filings from Q1 2026 tell a story Newsom’s publicist would prefer you didn’t read. His Campaign for Democracy PAC — the vehicle he’s using to build a 2028 presidential brand — spent more money buying his own book than on any other line item. The payments went to Porchlight Book Company and were listed as “books at cost.” That’s PAC-speak for “we bought pallets of our boss’s memoir at wholesale and shipped them to donors who clicked a button.”
Total copies sold according to the publisher: approximately 97,400. Total copies purchased by Newsom’s own PAC: approximately 67,000. That leaves roughly 30,000 copies that were purchased by actual human beings who walked into a bookstore or clicked “buy now” on Amazon without being prompted by a campaign email.
Thirty thousand copies is a respectable number for a regional cookbook. For the sitting governor of the fifth-largest economy on Earth, running a shadow presidential campaign with a war chest in the tens of millions, thirty thousand copies means almost nobody wanted to read your book unless you bribed them with a tax-deductible donation receipt.
The title of the memoir, by the way, is “Young Man in a Hurry.” We’re going to let that one sit there and do its own work. Here is how the scam operates, and it’s important to understand the mechanics because this is going to become the standard playbook for every vanity candidate with a PAC and a ghostwriter. Step one: write a book nobody asked for. Step two: create a PAC. Step three: use the PAC’s donor money to buy tens of thousands of copies of your own book. Step four: offer “free” copies to new donors, creating a circular economy where donations fund book purchases that fund bestseller claims that fund more donations. Step five: go on television and introduce yourself as a “bestselling author.”
At no point in this cycle does a human being need to genuinely want to read the book. The book is not a product. The book is a laundering mechanism for converting PAC money into a marketing credential.
And the best part? It’s probably legal. Campaign finance law is a colander with the holes punched by the people using it. Buying your own book with PAC funds isn’t technically prohibited as long as you can argue it’s a legitimate campaign expense — and handing out free copies to donors is, in the view of most campaign finance lawyers, a legitimate form of donor outreach. The law doesn’t require that anyone read the book. The law doesn’t require that anyone want the book. The law just requires that the PAC file the expense correctly, which Newsom’s did.
So congratulations, Governor. You are technically a bestselling author in the same way that a restaurant that buys its own Yelp reviews is technically five stars. The numbers check out. The achievement is hollow. And everyone who matters knows the difference.
The California governor is running for president on a record of rolling blackouts, organized retail theft, a $68 billion budget deficit, and a book two-thirds of Americans would never have heard of if his PAC hadn’t bought it for them. Young man in a hurry, indeed. Running from his own sales figures.
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