He had a good-paying job as a child support officer with the city of San Francisco. Things took a turn for the father of two in 2015 when he needed foot surgery and was prescribed a 30-day take-home supply of opioids.

“I started going out to the street to purchase more because I couldn’t get any more from my doctor and I got full-on addicted,” he told the Washington Examiner. “At the peak of my addiction, I was taking 560 milligrams of oxycodone every single day.”

Wolf said the levee broke when his wife found out that their house was in foreclosure because he had stopped paying the mortgage to buy drugs.

“I quit my job, so I was unemployed, and she cut me off from the money, and when that happened, I was in withdrawal, and the only recourse I had was to go purchase heroin on the street,” he said.

His wife kicked him out of the house and got a restraining order.

Wolf’s home became the Tenderloin, and he turned into a mule for drug dealers. He got arrested. A lot. But in California that only meant a slap on the wrist. People arrested on low-level drug charges were back on the street, sometimes, within the hour.

“I got arrested six times in a three-month period, and finally, after the sixth arrest, they kept me in custody for three months,” he said.

He got clean in jail and went to a six-month residential treatment program at the Salvation Army.

“I found recovery, and I have been clean and sober for 6 1/2 years,” he said. “And I am back with my wife and kids.”

These days, Wolf is trying to help those with addiction get off the streets and told the Washington Examiner that it starts with a get-tough approach to crime and drugs that the state has lacked under Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA).

Proposition 47: Complete catastrophe

California has suffered for a decade following the passage of Proposition 47, a referendum that critics claimed gave shoplifters and drug addicts the green light to commit crimes and steal merchandise as long as what they took was less than $950 in value. That decision, coupled with selective enforcement that focused on more serious crimes, has resulted in chaos.

Proposition 47 has been widely viewed as a catastrophe. It was supported by the state Democratic Party, championed by the American Civil Liberties Union, and passed by a wide margin in 2014.

By 2021, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who was just voted out of office, declared a state of emergency in the Tenderloin. Last year surpassed 2020 as the deadliest on record for overdose deaths in San Francisco, and 2024 is shaping up to be just as bad.

Voters pushed back this year and passed Proposition 36, which made changes to Proposition 47.

One person who tried to stop those changes was Newsom, who argued that a more tough-on-crime approach would overcrowd state prisons at taxpayers’ expense.

“And I don’t think it’s an improvement of public safety,” Newsom argued during a stop in Oakland.

A majority of Californians disagreed.

Trump win breathes life into Newsom’s political aspirations

Newsom has hit a sour note with voters as of late.

A Public Policy Institute of California poll taken in June found that 62% of Californians believe the state is headed in the wrong direction and only 44% approve of Newsom’s performance. A roundup of 30 polls from The Hill found that number even lower, with a 27% favorability rating and 49.2% unfavorability rating.

But with President-elect Donald Trump’s comeback win this week, Newsom has quickly seized on an opportunity to get a jump on his 2028 competition.

“Newsom is going to lead the resistance government for the next two years as governor, and then after that, he is a very prominent and nationally recognized party leader,” said Dan Schnur, who teaches political communications at the University of Southern California, Pepperdine University, and the University of California, Berkeley. “There will be dozens of other plausible Democrats thinking about the 2028 race, but none of them start with the advantages that Newsom has developed for himself.”

Newsom on Thursday announced a special session of the California legislature to “Trump-proof” the state and ensure the attorney general’s office and other state agencies have the funding they need.

“We won’t sit idle,” the governor said. “California has faced this challenge before, and we know how to respond.”

Laura Martinez, a rideshare driver in San Francisco, told the Washington Examiner that life under the Newsom regime was not all it was cracked up to be.

Martinez and her boyfriend moved to California from North Carolina because she thought their quality of life would get better, and she wants to fulfill her childhood dream of opening up a cupcake shop. She got a loan, but it was not as high as she needed, and when she looked into insurance, she came up empty.

“If I ever open up a business, it won’t be here,” she said. “And we’re too poor to move back.”

Across the bay, Derreck Johnson, the owner of Home of Chicken and Waffles in Oakland, told the Washington Examiner that he had to move locations because crime had gotten so bad. There were regular car break-ins, and customers were robbed frequently. And because there were hardly any consequences attached, it happened over and over again.

“I feel like the city owes small businesses like myself some type of reimbursement,” he said. “You can’t call the police. It’s a waste of time. You can’t make a police report because it’s a waste of time. I guess some people do it for their insurance, but then it just makes your rates go up, or you lose insurance.”

Johnson said that even though he loves his city, it is hard to shake off the perception that it is dangerous when everyone keeps getting robbed.

‘It’s just politics for him’

Wolf told the Washington Examiner that Newsom has been playing politics with people’s lives and that destructive policies the governor has backed to save his own political skin have turned parts of California into a place that is hardly recognizable.

“Look, I’m a Democrat, but Newsom just shows his arrogance whenever he talks about [crime and drugs],” Wolf said. “It’s just politics for him. By the time it gets to the governor, it’s all politics and optics. He has to pander to the progressive base of the Democratic Party which currently has a supermajority of the voting bloc in California, of the state Senate, of the state Assembly. It’s majority progressive Democrats, and he has to obviously pander to them. He does believe in criminal justice reform, and so do I, but you have to look and say, ‘You’ve had your chance. you’ve had 10 years.’”

It’s not just drugs and crime that voters are upset over. Homelessness has been Newsom’s signature issue since he was elected mayor of San Francisco in 2004. As governor, he hatched various schemes such as putting the growing homeless population in taxpayer-funded hotels and buying them brand-new campers.

According to the Hoover Institution, the state has spent $24 billion on homelessness since 2019. Homelessness has increased in that time by 30,000 to more than 181,000.

“Put differently, California spent the equivalent of about $160,000 per person over the last five years,” senior adjunct fellow Lee Ohanian said. “Newsom vetoed bipartisan legislation that would have required his administration to conduct an annual evaluation of homelessness spending. Without these changes, California will continue to spend enormous sums on homelessness while the number who are homeless remains very high.”

During the primaries, Newsom went all-in on Proposition 1, a $6.4 billion bond measure that tackled homelessness by restructuring the state’s mental health services. Newsom, by his own design, became the face of Proposition 1, starring in ads to support it and even going on a statewide tour to promote it. His “Yes on 1” committee outspent the opposition by more than 13,000 to 1. The problem was that Proposition 1 barely passed, by fewer than 30,000 votes, in a state of 40 million.

“When you’re in a strong blue state and you put a bond on the ballot geared toward solving voters’ No. 1 issue and it barely passes, I think it says more about [his] political strategy and less about the actual issue,” Los Angeles-based Democratic strategist Michael Trujillo told Politico.

Legislative pushback

Signs of frustration with Newsom were on display during the closing hours of the 2024 legislative session. His last-minute demands to force gasoline refiners to maintain larger reserves and give “token refunds” to electric power ratepayers did not end well in August. In fact, he was rebuffed by lawmakers in his own party who were ticked off by his 11th-hour antics.

Newsom ended up calling a special session, dragging lawmakers back to Sacramento. His power move also came at the expense of labor unions, which argued that it would jeopardize worker safety and warned that if storage requirements were untenable for refiners, it would lead to closures and massive job loss.

Newsom also vetoed a bill that would have created the most comprehensive regulatory framework for artificial intelligence in the country. He described his decision by saying that while the bill was “well-intentioned,” it was a mistake because it would apply “stringent standards” to basic functions. Proponents pitched it as a game-changer in improving AI safety.

Some of the measures Newsom did approve included labor bills to protect the earnings of child influencers and the likeness of Hollywood stars, a ban on all plastic bags in retail stores, and legislation to name the Dungeness crab as the official state crustacean. He also OK’d a measure that would require health insurers to cover the costs of infertility treatment, including in vitro fertilization.

Newsom has just two years before he terms out of office, and in that time, he has to shift the sentiment that his state is not sinking under his tutelage.

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On Sunday, he released a list of 73 things he wants to get done, including preparing the state for bird flu outbreaks and building enough electric vehicle charging stations to support his goal of banning the sale of any new gas-powered cars by 2035.

“I guess we’re along for the ride whether we like it or not,” Martinez said.