Nobody is getting under MAGA skin like California Governor Gavin Newsom.
The Democratic bully-for-good has been on a social media crusade this week, rising to the top of algorithmic feeds by parodying Donald Trump’s posting style and his attention-grabbing stunts. Some of those low-brow trolling efforts include reposting a photoshopped image of Mount Rushmore with Newsom’s face on it, a mock-up of Newsom as a king on the cover of Time magazine, as well as an AI-hatched depiction of Newsom surrounded by Tucker Carlson, the late Hulk Hogan, and Kid Rock (and then writing in all-caps that he hates Kid Rock.)
The déjà vu is intended to serve as a jarring mirror for Republicans still allied with the authoritarian president, and, incredibly, it’s working.
“He’s trying to mimic President Trump,” Trump’s first term chief strategist Steve Bannon told Politico Playbook. “He’s no Trump, but if you look at the Democratic Party, he’s at least getting up there, and he’s trying to imitate a Trumpian vision of fighting, right? He looks like the only person in the Democratic Party who is organizing a fight that they feel they can win.”
“People in the MAGA movement and the America First movement should start paying attention to this, because it’s not going to go away, they’re only going to get more intense,” Bannon added.
The California governor’s social media strategy is a novel one for Democrats, fighting the right’s AI-generated slop with even more AI-generated slop. In one particularly viral post, Newsom ragged on the president’s latest variant of “covfefe,” mocking Trump for posting “bela” to his most frequented communication platform, Truth Social.
“DONALD (TINY HANDS), HAS WRITTEN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY THIS MORNING—UNFORTUNATELY (LOW IQ) HE SPELLED IT WRONG—‘BETA,’” Newsom wrote. “SOON YOU WILL BE A ‘FIRED’ BETA BECAUSE OF MY PERFECT, ‘BEAUTIFUL MAPS.’ THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!—GCN”
Newsom, in his own words, has “changed.”
“The facts have changed; [Democrats] need to change,” Newsom told Fox LA’s Elex Michaelson Tuesday.
Breaking character momentarily during a press conference last week, Newsom said that he hoped the dumbed-down antics would serve as a “wake-up call for the president of the United States.”
“I’m sort of following his example. If you’ve got issues with what I’m putting out, you sure as hell should have concerns about what he’s putting out as president,” Newsom continued. “I think the deeper question is how have we allowed the normalization of his tweets, Truth Social posts over the course of the last many years, to go without similar scrutiny and notice?”
Newsom’s nonsense has ruffled feathers all the way to the Oval Office. Asked for a request to comment to Politico, the White House issued what could be the first official statement in meme format.
The post Even Steve Bannon Admits Gavin Newsom Is Onto Something appeared first on New Republic.
