(Editor’s note: This article was first published in the Fresno Bee on Aug. 28.)
Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced his opposition to current governor Gavin Newsom’s response to the Texas redistricting scam. In a special election this November, Golden State voters will be asked to approve new Congressional districts gerrymandered to favor Democrats in time for the 2026 midterm election.
Newsom is attempting to preserve the country’s last shred of democracy against President Donald Trump’s autocratic ambitions by adding up to five seats to the California Congressional delegation.
Blind to the militarization of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., Schwarzenegger is more concerned with his own weak legacy, having supported establishment of the state’s independent redistricting commission in 2008, a constitutional amendment effort led by Common Cause. He has little else to boast about from his time in Sacramento.
Schwarzenegger has nothing to offer California voters in this debate. Politically and personally, he has much in common with Trump, and neither one’s judgment can be trusted. From large increases in government debt while in office, to sexual assaults gone unpunished, to executive power grabs, the two men are two of a kind.
They’re screen personalities with political careers based on image and ambition who lack substance and a basic understanding of the struggles faced by working-class people.
Like Trump today, Schwarzenegger was elected despite credible reports of sexual assault by at least 15 women, according to the Los Angeles Times. Echoing Trump’s series of failed marriages and affairs, he also fathered a child with a housekeeper, bringing his marriage to an end.
Like Trump yet again, Schwarzenegger relied on secret accords with tabloids to avoid public accountability by buying and killing reports of those sexual assaults while running for office, according to The Bulwark, a moderate Republican website.
“It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that Schwarzenegger pioneered the master catch-and-kill methodology with tabloid czar David Pecker that Trump would later use to clear his path to the White House,” wrote A.L. Bardach in 2023.
Twenty years ago, California faced another November special election, one engineered by Schwarzenegger himself. Like Trump today, he was making a brazen power grab.
The Austrian-born bodybuilder—turned actor turned politician turned actor again—sought the right to declare a fiscal emergency as governor in order to suspend public employee union contracts, end teacher tenure and slash school funding.
Trump and Schwarzenegger share another disturbing similarity, an ideology that favors autocracy, one modeled for them at home by their fathers. Fred Trump was arrested in 1927 for his participation in a KKK rally in New York, and both father and son have been sued for racist housing discrimination as landlords.
In 1939, Gustav Schwarzenegger joined the Sturmabteilungen, also known as the “Storm Troopers” or “Brownshirts,” about six months after Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, “when Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were attacked across Germany and Austria and thousands of Jews were hauled off to concentration camps,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
As a union political organizer in 2005, I got an up-close look at Schwarzenegger’s political priorities and personality, including participation in debates against him in Fresno and Sacramento. It was ugly.
Fortunately, the Alliance for a Better California coalition of nearly all the state’s unions stood together in opposition to his agenda and soundly defeated him. They must do the same again today by supporting Newsom’s redistricting strategy.
Schwarzenegger, for his part, should at long last quit seeking the limelight and instead reflect on what’s happening around us. He is in danger of helping Trump and the MAGA movement grow in power by asking California to be like Austria in 1938 and capitulate to the dangerous would-be dictator Trump. Like father, like son.
