Newsom pitches a federal stock-trading ban, then endorses the measure canceling his state's billionaire tax.

…(cont) On October 1, a former Andreessen Horowitz partner, John O'Farrell, posted a twelve-part thread explaining, under his own name, that he would be happy to pay the tax himself. The campaign against it kept running.

On Friday, October 9, Gov. Gavin Newsom endorsed Proposition 42. Proposition 42 cancels out Proposition 40 and prohibits any future tax, retroactive or otherwise, on the ownership of financial assets or personal property. One measure taxes a defined group of people, once. The other forecloses the subject for good. SEIU-UHW, the union leading the Proposition 40 campaign, said the endorsement showed Newsom's "true colors."

Eight days later, in Exeter, New Hampshire, Newsom told the Washington Examiner he supports a federal ban on stock trading by the executive branch and the president. "100%, yeah, 100%," he said, at an event read as a tryout for a 2028 run.

Run the two columns against each other, hon. In New Hampshire, Newsom asks that executive branch officials, including the president, be barred from trading the markets they oversee while in office. In California, the same week, he is endorsing a measure that bars the state from ever taxing the people who already own the most of it. Both concern money and power sitting too close together. Only one of the two bans survives contact with his own ballot.

The donors funding resistance to Proposition 40 since August, Brin and Thiel among them, are the same donor class whose financial-asset holdings Proposition 42 would place permanently out of reach of any future tax. Newsom's name sits on both stories: the federal reform he is pitching in New Hampshire, and the state measure, dated October 9, that cancels the one reform already on his own ballot.