Fitness icon Jillian Michaels told Newsmax that California's political trajectory amounts to a state "captured" by one-party rule, and warned voters haven't seen the worst of it yet.
Michaels, best known as a trainer on NBC's "The Biggest Loser" and now a frequent conservative media commentator, appeared Thursday on Newsmax's "National Report" to deliver a blunt assessment of the Golden State's direction. She pointed to a new theft-diversion bill, a gubernatorial race she expects Democrats to win easily, and a political culture she believes has spiraled since the last Republican governor left Sacramento.
Her broadside lands as California Assembly Bill 2108, a measure that would let low-level theft offenders avoid jail through statewide diversion programs, sits before the state Senate Appropriations Committee. Law enforcement groups say the bill would gut the tougher penalties voters just approved in 2024. Michaels framed the legislation as one more sign that Sacramento's leadership class answers to ideology, not to the residents living with the consequences.
Michaels pegged the start of California's slide to the end of Arnold Schwarzenegger's governorship in 2011. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, served from 2003 to 2011. Democrats Jerry Brown and then Gavin Newsom followed him, and, in Michaels' telling, the state never recovered.
"This began once we lost Arnold Schwarzenegger, and it is a rapid descent into chaos and madness."
Michaels has previously said she left California for Florida over her dissatisfaction with the state's political direction. That personal decision gives her commentary a concrete edge: she is not an outside critic lobbing opinions from a distance but someone who voted with her feet.
Her prediction for what comes next was equally direct. Former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, a Democrat and former California attorney general, advanced to a November runoff for governor against Republican Steve Hilton after this year's primary. Michaels said she expects Becerra to win, and she predicted Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman will defeat incumbent Mayor Karen Bass in that city's runoff.
Becerra has already opened a wide polling lead over Hilton in the governor's race, reinforcing Michaels' expectation that the state's one-party tilt will only deepen.
"In which case, it leads me to tell you, I don't think you've seen anything yet."
That warning carried a specific policy referent: AB 2108.
Introduced by Assemblymember LaShae Sharp-Collins, a Democrat from San Diego, AB 2108 would create a statewide diversion process for certain low-level, nonviolent theft offenses. Offenders who complete the program would have their charges dismissed. The bill excludes violent theft, organized retail theft rings, and habitual repeat offenders, and it preserves judges' discretion on a case-by-case basis.
Sharp-Collins has said the bill offers "rehabilitation pathways for people driven to theft by poverty." That framing treats shoplifting as a symptom of economic hardship rather than a crime requiring consequences, a premise that California's law enforcement establishment flatly rejects.
The California District Attorneys Association and the California State Sheriffs Association both oppose the measure. They argue AB 2108 would weaken accountability for repeat offenders and undercut Proposition 36, the 2024 ballot measure in which California voters chose to toughen penalties for certain theft and drug crimes.
That voter-approved crackdown passed barely two years ago. AB 2108 would, in the view of prosecutors and sheriffs, functionally reverse part of what the electorate demanded. The bill cleared the Assembly earlier this year and now awaits action in the Senate Appropriations Committee.
California's criminal justice debates do not exist in a vacuum. The state's lenient sentencing outcomes have drawn national scrutiny in recent high-profile cases, feeding a broader perception that Sacramento prioritizes offenders over victims.
Michaels' core charge, that California "has been captured", is less a partisan talking point than a structural observation. Since Schwarzenegger left office fifteen years ago, Democrats have held the governorship without interruption. They hold supermajorities in both legislative chambers. They control every statewide constitutional office. And when voters push back, as they did with Proposition 36, the legislature moves to soften the result.
That dynamic is what Michaels described as capture. A state where one faction holds every lever of power, and where voter-approved reforms can be quietly diluted by the same officials voters tried to overrule.
The consequences extend well beyond theft policy. California's approach to immigration enforcement has repeatedly clashed with federal authorities, a tension visible in recent cases involving freed illegal immigrants and in federal operations like Operation Guardian Angel, which arrested hundreds of previously deported migrants from California jails.
Even within the Democratic Party, California's political class has shown fractures. State Democrats recently broke with both Newsom and Becerra by endorsing a billionaire wealth tax, a move that suggests the party's internal pressures push it further left, not toward the center.
Michaels sees no correction on the horizon. If Becerra wins the governor's mansion and Raman takes City Hall in Los Angeles, the state's two most powerful executive offices will have shifted further from the voters who passed Proposition 36 and who polls show want tougher enforcement, not softer diversion programs.
Proposition 36 was supposed to be the course correction. California voters went to the ballot box in 2024 and said, plainly, that they wanted stiffer penalties for theft and drug crimes. The measure passed. It became law. And now, barely into the next legislative session, AB 2108 proposes to route low-level theft offenders around the very accountability framework voters chose.
The bill's sponsors frame diversion as compassion. Prosecutors and sheriffs call it an end-run around the electorate. Both sides cannot be right. But only one side, the legislature, has the power to act without asking voters again.
Michaels' appearance on Newsmax gave voice to a frustration shared by millions of Californians who have watched their votes diluted by a political class that treats election results as suggestions. She did not hold back, and she did not offer false hope that the November races would change the trajectory.
When the people who make the laws can quietly undo the laws the people just made, "captured" is not an overstatement, it is a diagnosis.
