Gavin Newsom: The Internet Troll You Didn’t See Coming

“I’ve changed,” Newsom told Fox LA when asked about his new media approach in an interview that posted overnight. “The facts have changed; we [Democrats] need to change.”

With an inescapable, smashmouth, all-caps-laden and meme-filled X account, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is holding a mirror up to MAGA — and MAGA doesn’t like what it sees.

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.”
If this genre of social media post provokes deja vu, there’s a good reason for that.

“He’s trying to imitate President Trump,” MAGA vanguard Steve Bannon tells POLITICO. “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.”

For a decade, President Donald Trump has blazed trails online. And now, Newsom has found that by replicating Trump’s posts to the point of outright parody and trolling, he’s effectively gamed social media algorithms and colonized X’s typically right-coded “for you” tab.

In doing so, Newsom is not only getting on Republicans’ nerves, but also potentially redefining how Democrats function as the opposition party in the age of Trump.

Michelle Obama famously advised Democrats to live by a dictum: “When they go low, we go high.” Newsom has approached it a bit differently: When they go low, we go low, and — backed by lots of AI-generated slop — end up high in the algorithm.

“I’ve changed,” Newsom told Fox LA when asked about his new media approach in an interview that posted overnight. “The facts have changed; we [Democrats] need to change.”