The White House attempted to brush off Gavin Newsom’s trolling by insisting Trump “never thinks” about the California governor—before posting a meme about him that ended up as a spectacular self-own.
Newsom’s press team has switched up its messaging, turning to memeified all-caps taunts and AI-spun parodies to troll President Trump’s administration. It appears to have worked.
White House communications director Steven Cheung has rage-posted about the account, and deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson called Newsom’s posts “very weird and not at all funny.”
She also replied to a request from Politico’s Playbook using a homemade meme that literally name-checks Newsom while also suggesting that the Trump administration “never thinks” about him.
“Thank you for your attention to this matter!” she quipped, quoting Trump’s signature Truth Social sign-off.
The image riffed on Mad Men, where Jon Hamm’s Don Draper tells Ben Feldman’s Michael Ginsberg, “I don’t think about you at all.” In the White House version, Draper’s face was replaced with a smug-looking Trump, while Ginsberg was swapped out for Newsom’s press account and the California bear motif.
The meme, sent by Jackson, doesn’t make sense, given that it suggests that the White House “never thinks” about Newsom, despite one of its lackeys presumably spending time creating a meme that mentions him.
The Daily Beast asked the White House for comment on its meme attacking Newsom. Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson replied with another meme, showing a crying man with a bicycle fixed to his head. The words “ding ding” come from a bell on the handlebars.
“dOeS ThE MeME mAkE sEnSe????????” Jackson said.
It comes as Steve Bannon told Playbook that Newsom’s play is an attempt to “mimic” Trump for political gain. He said, “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.”
By his own admission, Newsom has “changed.” He told Fox News Tuesday, “I’ve changed. The facts have changed; we [Democrats] need to change.”
Stefan Smith, a digital strategist who was online engagement director on Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign, said the switch-up is paying off.
“The man was political roadkill a few months ago, but, with a shift in strategy, he’s become a cause célèbre of the Resistance 2.0. No doubt the rest of the 2028 shadow primary entrants are taking notes,” he said.
Newsom, meanwhile, has said that the new social media strategy is a response to how “we’ve allowed the normalization of his [Trump’s] tweets and social posts over the last many years to go without similar scrutiny.”
The Trump administration’s online antics are well-known. The president’s social team cranks out AI-edited memes on a regular basis—Trump as a lightsaber-swinging Jedi, or Trump in papal robes labeled “Pope Trump.”
It has also posted a so-called ASMR video that showed ICE agents chaining undocumented migrants ahead of a deportation flight.
Trump and his team have also taken to calling Newsom “Newscum,” on social media and in TV interviews. “I hope it’s a wake-up call for the president of the United States,” the California governor said last week.
The White House and representatives for Newsom did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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