Actor James Woods warned that Gov. Gavin Newsom’s rising national profile masks what he called an “atrocious” record in California, particularly regarding wildfire management, arguing that the Democrat’s early appeal as a future presidential candidate will not ultimately carry him to party leadership.

Woods said Newsom is filling a “power vacuum” within the Democratic ranks, dismissing other names being floated for party leadership as a “clown show.”

“They have no leader. I mean, Kamala Harris, AOC, all these people, they’re — I hate to use the expression, because it’s used so often, but they’re a clown show, and nature abhors a vacuum,” he said Sunday on “One Nation with Brian Kilmeade.”

California’s Governor Gavin Newsom speaks after California’s special election on Proposition 50, a measure that would temporarily redraw congressional districts, at the California Democratic Party Headquarters in Sacramento, California, on Nov. 4, 2025. (Reuters/Fred Greaves)

He cautioned that Newsom’s growing national presence should not be mistaken for competence.

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“This slick grifter, Gavin Newsom, whose record is atrocious, but people don’t pay a lot of attention to that fact. He’s filling in the slot, basically,” said Woods. “But, as fruit farmers always say, early ripe, early rotten.”

Woods pointed to the wildfires that swept through his neighborhood, asserting that state failures, not climate change, fueled the destruction.

“It’s really simple. Our house did survive… by the grace of God, and because we followed fire department guidelines,” he said, noting that he cleared brush and terraced his hillside. “The house next to us didn’t do it — burned down.”

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He said the houses on his street that didn’t have their brush cut back burned down.

Woods accused the state of neglecting a nearby parcel of land that he said became a dangerous ignition point.

“They haven’t cleared that brush since the 1978 fire, because that little piece of land there is controlled by the state,” Woods said. “And they’re protecting a plant that is literally a weed. And that’s where the fire started in our neighborhood.”

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The acclaimed actor claimed that Newsom deflected accountability, “blaming the fire management failure on climate change, that boogeyman that has worked forever.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom said the action halting federal EV infrastructure funding is “illegal.” (Amy Sussman/Getty Images)

Woods also cited what he sees as another example of Newsom’s leadership failures: San Francisco’s “notorious poop map.”

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“One of the most beautiful cities in the history of this nation, San Francisco, had to have the notorious poop map, so that tourists would not find themselves wading through human waste and used heroin needles as they walked the streets of this once-beautiful city, because this man couldn’t find a way to stop that from happening,” he said.

Woods argued that California’s leadership tolerated worsening street conditions “unless a foreign leader was coming,” but wouldn’t clean up for “our tax-paying, hard-working citizens.”