The Fox News commentator Dana Perino has finally had enough. “You have to stop it with the Twitter thing,” she told the chief executive. “I don’t know where his wife is,” she fumed. “If I were his wife, I would say, ‘You are making a fool of yourself! Stop it!’” She went on to note that he has a big job, and that he has to be “a little more serious.”
What a relief to see someone from Fox, the flagship MAGA network, getting completely fed up with juvenile social-media behavior from a national politician. Except the chief executive in this case was not Donald Trump, the president of the United States, but Gavin Newsom, the governor of California.
Newsom has taken to trolling Trump on social media by imitating his bizarre rants, odd capitalizations, and affection for exclamation points. He has also posted several memes that are on-the-nose parodies of things Trump has fed to his followers for years. Politico recently summarized some of Newsom’s activities on social media:
There’s Newsom on Mount Rushmore. There’s Newsom getting prayed over by Tucker Carlson, Kid Rock and an angelic, winged Hulk Hogan. There’s Newsom posting in all caps, saying his mid-cycle redistricting proposal has led “MANY” people to call him “GAVIN CHRISTOPHER ‘COLUMBUS’ NEWSOM (BECAUSE OF THE MAPS!). THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”
Newsom got even closer to Trumpian perfection with a post yesterday that is almost impossible to tell apart from an actual outburst from the president:
WHAT IS WRONG WITH CRACKER BARREL?? KEEP YOUR BEAUTIFUL LOGO!!! THE NEW ONE LOOKS LIKE CHEAP VELVEETA “CHEESE” FROM WALMART, THE PLACE FOR “GROCERIES” (AN OLD FASHIONED TERM)!!!
Some of these jibes are clumsy, but many are well crafted and even funny, despite the unsettling fact that the person whom the governor is parodying is the commander in chief. And the proof that Newsom is on to something is that his supporters are reacting with genuine rage. Perhaps Newsom has hit a nerve because satire is always more effective than name-calling. Mango Mussolini or Cheeto Jesus (both of which refer to the president’s unusual bronzed skin tone) appeal only to Trump’s opponents. But a post that perfectly mimics Trump’s antics is a mirror—one that prompts people to consider how Trump looks to everyone else in the world.
At the least, Newsom has scored a direct hit on the double standard both in the national press and among the public that excuses Trump’s deeply concerning behavior as merely part of Trump’s shtick, some facet of his personality that cannot be held to account. Too many reporters have resorted to sane-washing Trump, forcing his bizarre statements somehow to make sense by cherry-picking the occasional phrase or sentence related to policy while ignoring his kooky rants about sharks and his Stalinist threats against his political enemies. Newsom’s parodies sidestep all the hand-wringing criticism about how presidents should act: Instead they show, rather than explain, what it should feel like when anyone but Trump acts the way Trump acts.
Perino is just one of many who is in high dudgeon. (Newsom responded to Perino with a dead-on Trump-like response: “DANA ‘DING DONG’ PERINO (NEVER HEARD OF HER UNTIL TODAY!)” Vice President J. D. Vance has lashed out at Newsom, telling Fox that the Californian’s attacks aren’t landing because his trolling “ignores the fundamental genius of President Trump’s political success, which is that he’s authentic”; in other words, everyone knows that Newsom’s crackpot hijinks are fake but Trump’s are real—a rather odd defense.
And of course, the MAGA posters on social media and Facebook have flown off the handle with rage. (Newsom is having a “mental breakdown,” said one MAGA influencer, without a trace of irony.) As it turns out, the people who pioneered the slogan “Fuck your feelings” are impossibly delicate souls.
Others have adopted a pose of criticizing Newsom more in sorrow than anger. “I’m all for appreciating crass humor,” said Harmeet Dhillon, a lawyer and MAGA social-media stalwart who is now assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Trump Justice Department. “I love South Park. It’s hilarious.” (One wonders if she’s been watching the show recently.) “But don’t just be a loser copying the most powerful person in the world’s style.” Trump’s majordomo at Fox, Sean Hannity, summed up this New Seriousness among the president’s supporters when he tut-tutted Newsom’s “performative confrontational style,” adding that “maybe it wins you points with the loony radical base in your party,” but it won’t win elections. How refreshing: Fox commentators and leading figures in the Trump administration all agreeing that a politician should not conduct himself in public like a dim, insufferable child.
They’re all so close to getting it.
I admit that I am conflicted about Newsom’s approach. Some years ago, I wrote that Trump’s opponents, especially the ones addicted to terms such as Drumpf, the Orange Menace, Cadet Bone Spurs, and others needed to act like adults, and convey the gravity of their concerns about Trump instead of treating him like either an inconsequential boob or a towering werewolf whose name must not be invoked. The same goes for the too-online liberals who refer to “Rethuglicans” and “RepubliKKKans”—uncomfortably similar to the media-addicted right-wingers who use infantile slams such as DemonRats and Killary.
One aspect of Newsom’s parodies have genuinely made me laugh: his posting of pictures done in the style of the artist and Trump admirer Jon McNaughton, who is a competent illustrator but whose paintings are strange. They’re a kind of hallucinatory mash-up of Grant Wood and medieval iconography, in which Trump carries the world like Atlas, or is blessed by dead presidents, or rescues the Constitution from glowering liberals. (The Newsom image with the deceased Hulk Hogan was so perfectly rendered that at first I thought it was created by McNaughton himself.) Trump supporters seem to love these pictures. Newsom has shown just how weird they are.
Newsom has made his point and should move on. But his lasting accomplishment has been to reveal that Trump’s supporters are not as impervious to reality as the president’s opponents might believe. I suspect—as I have since the day Trump announced his first run for president a decade ago—that the MAGA faithful are hypersensitive to criticisms of Trump because, in their hearts, many of them know. They know that many of Trump’s statements are offensive and alarmingly detached from reality. They know that Trump has a disordered personality. They know that the president is a daily embarrassment to his party and to his nation.
For years, these MAGA partisans have employed various tactics to prevent the imminent pain of cognitive dissonance. They resort to “what about” arguments aimed at other politicians; they claim that Trump actually knows what he’s doing or that they understand the message underneath all the broken thoughts, garbled words, and dead-end sentences. Now Newsom is forcing them to see what Trump looks like without the distorting force field created by Trump’s showmanship and his aggressive delivery of incoherent statements.
Come to think of it, maybe MAGA world isn’t close to getting it; maybe they do get it, and maybe that’s why, this time, they’re especially angry.
The post MAGA World Is So Close to Getting It appeared first on The Atlantic.
