THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS GOVERNOR!
What to make of Gavin Newsom’s new social-media performance art.
Last month, the House of Representatives went into recess early; this month, Donald Trump launched a crime crackdown in D.C. What did both moves have in common? They were intended in part to take attention off the administration’s woeful handling of the Epstein files. Now, though, that story may be inching forward again: On Friday, the Justice Department is expected to begin turning over Epstein records to the House Oversight Committee, which voted to subpoena them over the objections of chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) last month.
“There are many records in DOJ’s custody, and it will take the Department time to produce all the records and ensure the identification of victims and any child sexual abuse material are redacted,” Comer said in a statement this week. “I appreciate the Trump Administration’s commitment to transparency and efforts to provide the American people with information about this matter.” Happy Wednesday.
Gavin Newsom, Shitposter
by Hannah Yoest
Why is Gavin Newsom tweeting like Donald Trump?
Last week, the California governor’s press office embarked on a satiric journey on X. What began as a way to needle the Trump administration about its support for an off-cycle gerrymander in Texas soon became a drawn-out and divisive bit.
To the delight of some and the horror of others, Newsom’s team engaged caps lock and let it rip:
DONALD TRUMP, IF YOU DO NOT STAND DOWN, WE WILL BE FORCED TO LEAD AN EFFORT TO REDRAW THE MAPS IN CA TO OFFSET THE RIGGING OF MAPS IN RED STATES. BUT IF THE OTHER STATES CALL OFF THEIR REDISTRICTING EFFORTS, WE WILL DO THE SAME. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!
The ploy worked in at least one sense: It went viral. As the week went on, the governor’s team leaned into the Trumpian style. Each all-caps, self-aggrandizing, free-wheeling post full of threats, nicknames, and parentheticals seemed to perform better than the last, spurring praise from jaded libs and rage from MAGA diehards not in on the joke. The mimicry did not stop at the rhetorical level but mined all aspects of the paranoid-social-media style popularized by our Dear Leader, including the gratuitous use of hagiographic AI-generated images of Newsom added to Mount Rushmore and being blessed in prayer by Tucker Carlson and an angel Hulk Hogan.
But the real magic was happening in the replies: There’s no better word to describe the reactions of Tomi Lahren and other right-wing flying monkeys than “triggered.”
“Ah, so this is why conservatives love Trump,” wrote one popular left-leaning account paired with a picture of Danny DeVito captioned “I get it now.” “I cannot believe this bit is beginning to work on me,” wrote another, quote-tweeting a post mock-defending the strategy after a Fox News host called it “childish.”1
“I hope it’s a wake-up call for the president. I’m just following his example.” Newsom said in response to questions about the tweets. “If you have issues with what I’m putting out, you sure as hell should have concerns with what he’s putting out as president.”
Some of the posts are funny. But that’s not the point. The point is to show how deranged this style of communication really is; we’ve all just been conditioned into accepting Trump’s defining deviancy down.
With so many people missing the point, do we really gotta hand it to Newsom?
The stunt has invited the left to go low, with only the thinnest cover of ironic distance. With their new permission to shitpost for the greater good, a chorus of accounts gleefully took to sharing ever-more-inflammatory memes. The most common they-go-low-we-go-almost-as-low tactic was to compare Newsom’s and Vice President JD Vance’s physical appearances, financial pasts, and ethnicities.
One account posted photos comparing Newsom’s very white family with Vance’s family wearing Indian flower garlands, with the caption “which way america?”2 The “which way” caption template was reiterated by other accounts with even more starkly contrasting photos of Newsom and Vance.
“We are reaching levels of dark woke never thought possible,” wrote the executive director of Project Liberal in a quote tweet.
“The right is so culturally dominant that left-wing influencers are now making physiognomy posts,” wrote another progressive account about a post with high school headshots of the two men captioned “Chad Newsom > Chud Vance.” By this point, the ironic distance inherent in the humor was starting to disappear.
“Aryan, look at this Aryan. . . . Chad,” neo-Nazi provocateur Nick Fuentes exclaimed in reaction to a clip of Newsom’s remarks from the floor of the Democratic National Convention. “Chad, Gavin Newsom,” he continued. “If you don’t like Gavin Newsom, you’re kind of like gay? I just don’t know what to tell you. If you don’t like handsome, sociopathic, tall, white man who clearly has contempt for those around him and you don’t like it because he’s a Democrat, there’s something wrong with you.”
I’m not irony-pilled enough to know whether or not Fuentes is doing a bit when he urges his “groyper” followers to support Newsom, despite his policies and party, because of his race and appearance.
But when Fuentes’s followers ran with it, they left little room for credulity. “White excellence is on the ballot in 2028” posted another Groyper comparing Newsom to Vance. An account called YungPut1n compared Newsom and Vance in high school—and Newsom himself quote-tweeted it. YungPut1n is a Nazi account that shares images of the Sieg Heil salute and describes himself as an “intellectual wigger.”
If the reaction of the groypers is any indication, a little more ironic detachment might be a good thing. There is a wide gulf between strategic coalition-building with centrists and amplifying white nationalists’ toxic content. It’s hard to accept the it’s-a-joke defense when it is a well-known principle that bits are just sublimated desire (from the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks). A wink is an embrace.
Is any of this worth it? One of the biggest issues Democrats are facing is their lack of a household name to put on the ballot next cycle. Trump’s complete media saturation remains an underrated factor of his success in his first campaign—nearly a year before the 2016 election, more than 90 percent of Americans polled were familiar with him. So while being Very Online is not a winning strategy in and of itself, it has helped raise Newsom’s profile. According to Newsom’s office, the X account sending out the tweets has gained more than a quarter million subscribers this month and its engagement rate is above 50 percent (translation: very high).
Nevertheless, while Newsom’s social media strategy has proven to be entertaining and shed more light on the asymmetrical standards to which the public holds Democrats versus Trump, we should refuse to accept a fate in which our politics are reduced to mere farce while an oligarchy of Silicon Valley clanker pimps manipulate the government in service of their insatiable appetites.
As for the inciting issue, Newsom is on his back foot in the redistricting fight after the Texas standoff came to an end and the Republican-dominated Texas House moved forward with a redrawn map on Monday. For all the online theatrics, governing is still the function of politics. We’ll see how Newsom performs on that metric when California’s legislature votes on a proposal for its own new congressional map on Thursday.
But there is one immediate and visible result of Newsom holding a mirror up to our Poster-in-Chief’s Truth Social habits: Trump is no longer posting in all-caps.
We’re hitting the road again this fall for three live shows:
Toronto (Sep. 26)
Washington, D.C. (Oct. 8)
New York City (Oct. 11)
Join Sarah, Tim, JVL, and Sam for a night of politics among friends.
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AROUND THE BULWARK
It’s Hurricane Season. Do You Know Where Your FEMA Director Is? Dark days at the disaster response agency under Trump, JONATHAN COHN reports in The Breakdown, with senior leaders gone, staffing down, and money not going out the door as expected.
Tap Dancing Over a Precipice… On Just Between Us, JVL joins MONA CHAREN to reflect on the new courtiers and how they must fawn, the militarization of D.C., and one green shoot of push-back.
Is Trump’s Hooters-Obsessed Ambassador Nominee Toning Down His Shtick? In Press Pass, JOE PERTICONE takes a look at Nick Adams, and gives readers a peek inside Frank Lloyd Wright’s magnificent government building.
Trump’s Self-Enrichment… DAVID KIRKPATRICK joins TIM MILLER on the flagship pod to dig into how Trump has quietly turned his presidency into a multibillion-dollar windfall—fueled by crypto schemes, foreign money, and sweetheart deals with dictators—while his supporters foot the bill buying MAGA merch.
Quick Hits
THE MUSEUMS AREN’T TALKING ABOUT HOW HOT WE ARE: Donald Trump has taken a shine to using D.C. as a laboratory for policies he wants to roll out more broadly. First it was the federal crime crackdown, which he explicitly cast as a trial balloon for similar actions in other cities. Now, it’s the country’s museums—which he derided yesterday as “essentially the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’”
The primary target of his ire is the Smithsonian, which the White House announced last week would be subject to an “internal review” to ensure all exhibits would “celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.” Trump put it a bit more bluntly: “The Smithsonian,” he wrote on Truth Social, “is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.”
Now, Trump said, the gloves are coming off—and not just at the Smithsonian. “We are not going to allow this to happen, and I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made,” he wrote. “This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE. We have the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.”
WHEN I SAID ‘GENOCIDE,’ I DIDN’T MEAN GENOCIDE: Nobody’s having a particularly easy time talking about the ongoing war crimes and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza these days. Accusations and counteraccusations about support for Israel have inflamed the far right—forming the basis of the latest feud, for instance, between Laura Loomer and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. (Why can’t they both win, right?)
But Democrats aren’t having a much easier time of it. At an event last week, House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) referred to the “genocide and destruction” taking place in Gaza. Yesterday, however, she walked those comments back in a statement to Politico.
“Last week, while attending an event in my district, I repeated the word ‘genocide’ in response to a question. I want to be clear that I am not accusing Israel of genocide,” she said. “We all need to work with urgency to bring the remaining hostages home, surge aid to Palestinians and oppose their involuntary relocation, remove Hamas from power, and end the war.”
TRIPWIRE ALERT: As the United States tries to bring an end to the war in Ukraine, Kyiv has sought, and the White House has floated, “security guarantees” as a condition of peace to prevent Russia from violating the terms of whatever deal may emerge. But as Axios reports, certain MAGA factions aren’t thrilled at the prospect.
“These are tripwires,” Steve Bannon said on his podcast yesterday. “This is where things go from regional conflicts to world wars.”
Fact check: No world war has ever been started by a tripwire force.
Cheap Shots
The number of online progressives celebrating this cathartic yelp, interrupting the long sleepwalk toward authoritarianism, is matched only by the number of commentary-class conservatives feigning ignorance of the art of the troll.
This was a reference to both Which Way Western Man?, the 1978 book by white nationalist William Gayley Simpson, and a recent post by the Department of Homeland Security that evoked Simpson’s screed.
The beauty of Newsom is that it is both laugh out loud funny and turning the mirror on the GOP. Plus, it has the added bonus of being EXACTLY what we have been begging the Democrats to do.
The only way to combat a raging, narcissistic, pathological liar like Donald Trump is to mock them mercilessly at every turn.
Re Newsome. Love it. I'm an old centrist D and have been so sick and tired of the lame D response (AOC/Bernie notwithstanding). Show some huevos. Quit lying down like whipped pups.