Gavin Newsom Is Ready for His Closeup

BEIJING — The day after California Governor Gavin Newsom met with Chinese President Xi Jinping here, he joined U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns for a stroll along the Great Wall of China, one of the seven wonders of the world, the largest human-made structure ever built, 13,171 miles of stone, wood, bricks and packed earth. Standing atop the reconstructed Mutianyu portion of the wall, Burns recounted what Nixon said when he visited back in 1972: “It is indeed a Great Wall.”

“Is that the best he could come up with?” Newsom joked.

Later that night, Newsom’s press team posted photos to Flickr showcasing the governor’s day at the wall. One of them in particular caught the attention of folks back home. In it, Newsom, sporting aviators and a crisp white shirt, leans one arm against the wall and looks off into the distance, mouth slightly ajar, the late afternoon sun beaming across his face as the wall snakes into the mountains behind him. From that pose (all studied nonchalance) to that hair (salt and pepper and coiffed just so), he looks like the romantic lead of an action movie.

Mockery ensued.

People took to X, the website formerly known as Twitter, to superimpose his photo on different backgrounds: homeless encampments, workers in a mine, the oval office. “The new Ann Getty’s rug,” cracked one commentator, referencing the infamous 2004 Harper’s Bazaar spread where Newsom and then-wife Kimberly Guilfoyle — dubbed “The New Kennedys” — lay together on the floor of an ornate room in Ann Getty’s mansion. (“One of the most glamorous political unions since Jack and Jackie,” the article gushed of the then-San Francisco mayor and his spouse.)

In politics, a photo tells a story more so than anything else. The Great Wall photo elicited a lot of eye rolls, but it was far from the most important image to come out of Newsom’s one-week trip to China. That would be the photo of him shaking hands with Xi — a political feat at a time of geopolitical tension that would be nearly impossible for any other governor, and hard for even national leaders, to land.

Newsom’s trip was billed primarily as an opportunity to advance international cooperation on climate change. But as he met with Xi and other high ranking Chinese officials, it was also an opportunity for the Democrat to burnish his presidential bonafides, as well as California’s place as a leader on the global stage. The governor dances around his presidential ambitions, but the carefully curated images on this trip were as clear a sign as any that he’s eyeing a run at the White House in ‘28. In China, he was photographed in plenty of dry meetings, including the one with Xi, looking the picture of a statesman.

But ironically, it was those over-the-top press materials — and his inability to resist the glamour shot — that revealed both his humanity and his fallibility.

Newsom brought along a former photojournalist with extensive experience covering the White House for the trip: Charles Ommanney, a British-born, San Francisco-based photographer, who’s got an eye for the compelling image. (Presumably wanting the photos to speak for themselves, Ommanney declined an interview.)

Ommanney spent decades as an international war photographer and years documenting U.S. presidents, including George W. Bush and Barack Obama, whom he photographed with his shoes up on the desk in his early days in the Oval Office. (Ommanney has had his own brush with fame, having been married to a Real Housewives of D.C. star, a level of exposure he later told The New York Times he regretted. He also had a stint as Mark Zuckerberg’s personal photographer.)

Over the past five months, Ommanney has been freelancing for Newsom, though the pictures the governor’s team shared were uncredited, which his team says is standard protocol. His rate, which is paid for with a contract through the state, is $5,000 a month for seven days and $1,500 for any additional days, though the team says he rarely exceeds a week. (His travel in China, as Newsom’s and the rest of his staff on the trip, was paid for by the California State Protocol Foundation, a nonprofit that takes money from donors and to which Newsom gave over $3 million since 2019 from his inaugural committee funds.)

Throughout the history of China-U.S. relations, scores of presidents have visited the Great Wall at historically significant moments. And indeed, near the wall, which you reach by gondola, cable cars dedicated to the U.S. presidents line the path. (Newsom snapped a selfie in front of one of them with his business office director and former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers.) Nixon was the first American president to visit the mainland while in office and his 1972 trip, an eight-day televised public relations extravaganza, helped break several decades of U.S.-PRC isolation and shifted the balance of power in the Cold War. (His photo at the Great Wall graced the cover of Time Magazine.) In 1984, Reagan was photographed at the Great Wall with Nancy Reagan; the Chinese press reported his visit as a “significant step forward” in relations, although Taiwan “remains a major obstacle.”

Bill Clinton followed up with a 1998 visit, in the wake of another period of chilly relations that began with the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square, and like Newsom, he was also criticized for pushing warmer engagement in the face of China’s crackdown on human rights. George W. Bush, whose father, before he was president, was the diplomatic envoy to China, was photographed at the wall in 2002. And when Obama visited in 2009, amid an economic downturn and political tensions both at home and abroad, the Wall Street Journal observed that he “hit a wall” with Chinese leaders who resisted most of his proposals. Though some of that was evident in other publicity photos of his trip, in his pictures along the Great Wall he looked as cool and in control as ever.

Governors have visited the wall as well, but Newsom was the first American governor to visit China in four years, and his trip, though the focus was on local and regional governments, certainly felt presidential. Chinese officials blocked traffic, provided him with a full motorcade and delayed the opening of the Forbidden City for Newsom’s private tour. At the U.S. embassy, he ribbed Texans and Floridians and talked about Reagan’s environmental work as a California governor and Nixon’s signing of the Clean Air Act. Everywhere he went, Newsom was received with great fanfare; numerous officials mentioned the glowing press from his tour.

The grand coup, of course, was scoring a meeting with Xi. The two talked about climate change and fentanyl, he said, and Newsom encouraged Xi to come to APEC and meet with President Joe Biden. (It was later reported that he would.) The governor of California, who prior to this visit had little foreign policy experience, presented himself as an effective diplomat on the world stage, riding a wave of thawing relations, advancing connections and taking down the temperature at a heated moment for China and the U.S. (At his speech on the Great Wall, he talked about how we can “tear down the wall of division between our countries.”)

Newsom is not running for president in ‘24. But as he traveled through China, those around him toyed with the possibility of him in the role. “How long until he runs?” mused a young investor at a Bay Area Council reception.

The trip was filled with a copious amount of photo ops, with Ommanney at the ready to capture them. In one, Newsom is pictured in the mirror of a BYD plug-in hybrid, looking pensive as men in suits stand around him. In another, he looks back through the window of an unreleased Tesla Model 3 (“What’s going on with the Cybertruck?” he asked at the factory visit. “I was in it with Elon a few months ago.”) In a third, at a wetland, he and first partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom crouch with open hands, feeding seeds to a red-crowned crane.

To be fair, some of the more over-the-top photo ops were not of Newsom’s own design. At one stop in Jiangsu, the setup involved him walking out of a hangar and onto a red carpet while dramatic orchestral music played in the background, wind turbines spun overhead and a woman in a sparkly dress shouted, “Please sign the MOU!” At the Tesla factory, four different models of driverless cars danced upon his arrival, fluttering their doors and opening and closing their trunks automatically to an electronic, The Who-esque remix of Auld Lang Syne.

“These are their events, not mine,” Newsom said of the pomp and circumstance. “Everybody's making a point here. The fact that we can turn a page. And I think it's a very healthy point.”

In some ways, the glamour-shot side of the trip felt perfectly Newsom-esque. Though he’s known in Sacramento as a policy wonk, his flashy side isn’t something he's really able to hide, and at times it's been his downfall. In 2020 it was attending a dinner party at the exclusive French Laundry restaurant during a Covid surge as the governor was discouraging holiday gatherings. Other times he’s tried to make a splash, only to have it backfire, like on this same trip, when he stepped out in dress shoes for a photo op to play basketball with school children, slipped, fell — and took down a small child.

When asked about his decision to hire a photographer with presidential cred, Newsom cast himself in a humble light. “I may be the only governor that literally was doing selfies, at best, in the last five years. We had no one, literally no one in the office that took pictures,” he said. He mentioned someone had given him Arnold Schwarzenegger’s high-gloss coffee table book, Seven Years, documenting his predecessor’s time as a governor. “It's beautiful,” said Newsom, and it inspired him as he thought about how his own time in office is captured: “It would be nice to memorialize,” he said. “It’s storytelling, it’s not just the written word.” As such, some of Ommanney’s photos from the trip cast Newsom as a leader in the California style — Hollywood, like another of California’s notable presidential exports.

“It's nice to finally have someone that knows how to take pictures,” Newsom said.

Not, he added hastily, “that Tonya [my social media director] and my interns didn't know how.”