'Pod Save America' Slams Gavin Newsom For Calling Man's Mistaken Deportation A 'Distraction'

“Pod Save America” hosts Jon Favreau and Dan Pfeiffer slammed California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) for downplaying and dismissing Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation as a “distraction.”

“You know, this is the distraction of the day,” Newsom said. “The art of distraction. Don’t get distracted by distractions, we say, and here we zig and zag. This is the debate they want,” he said.

Favreau responded to Newsom’s remarks on Friday’s episode, stating, “My head’s gonna fucking pop off my body.”

The Trump administration is “disappearing people to a dungeon in El Salvador,” he said at the outset of the episode, adding, “They don’t get a trial, they don’t get any contact with a lawyer or their families, they may never leave alive. And Trump says he’s looking into sending American citizens there next.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom called the mistaken deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia "the distraction of the day."

Justin Sullivan via Getty Images

While the governor did call Abrego Garcia’s deportation “Orwellian,” noting that “when a judge adjudicates, it’s not a question,” he continued to characterize it as a GOP sideshow.

“It’s exactly the debate [Republicans] want because they don’t want this debate on the tariffs,” he said.

Pfeiffer argued that while “tariffs, inflation, economic chaos, market drops, tax cuts for billionaires, cuts to Medicaid” are “the most persuasive message in all the polling,” Democrats nevertheless “look cowardly, calculating and fucking ridiculous” by backing down on Abrego Garcia’s case.

“If our response to the father and husband of a U.S. citizen being sent illegally in defiance of a Supreme Court order to a foreign gulag is to vomit up some poll-tested talking points about tariffs, to turn our back to it — like, that is absurd,” Pfeiffer added.

“Who are we and what do we stand for if we do that?” he asked.

He added there’s “so much on the line” and argued that “the idea that Democrats lose every time we talk about immigration is such learned helplessness.”

“We did not lose on immigration because we talked about people like Kilmar Albrego Garcia too much, we lost because we ceded the issue to Donald Trump,” Pfeiffer said.

Favreau and Pfeiffer’s comments about Newsom begin at the 26-minute mark in the video below.