Gavin Newsom’s Social Feed Shows a Democrat Can Troll Like Trump — And Expose Double Standards
(Image via x.com/MeachamDr)
Gavin Newsom just opened a new front in the information wars, and somehow pulled off the impossible: exposing a decade-long political double standard while trolling like a MAGA pro.
For years, Democrats showed up to a knife fight armed with polite essays. Donald Trump, meanwhile, rewrote the rules: live spectacle, outrage in all caps, reality‑show chaos. Policy papers didn’t win the moment; fury did.
Hillary Clinton leaned on dignity. Joe Biden pitched calm normalcy. Both eventually lost to Trump, who ran Twitter like a wrestling promo, daring decency to keep up. It didn’t.
Recently, California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press feed has gone nuclear. Not by accident, not by fluster — but as a precise, arch parody: a Trojan Horse of caps-lock mockery exposing Trump’s own genre. For once, a Democrat isn’t on defense. He’s flipping the script.
Newsom’s team embraced the caps-lock playground with glee. A recent X post read: “DONALD ‘TACO’ TRUMP… MISSED THE DEADLINE!!! CALIFORNIA WILL NOW DRAW NEW, MORE ‘BEAUTIFUL MAPS’… THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!” It was signed “GCN.”
Another blasted: “TINY HANDS IS OUT HERE COPYING ME—BUT WITHOUT THE STAMINA (SAD)… TOTAL BETA!”
Andrew Kirell put a fine point on the excercise, writing for the Reliable Sources newsletter, “The effort, clearly designed to hold a mirror up to MAGA and ‘bully the bullies,’ so to speak, has evidently gone over the heads of many conservative media personalities, baiting them into making Newsom’s point about Trump’s behavior on their own.”
Perhaps Newsom’s best work to date is an AI-mocked-up image of Kid Rock dressed as Uncle Sam endorsing Newsom:
This inspired predictable outrage from the pro-Trump Kid Rock, but … that was entirely the point.
Even Fox News anchors Trace Gallagher and Dana Perino have taken the bait, publicly ridiculing the social media posts as “juvenile” and urging, “put the phone away,” oblivious they were criticizing a parody of Trump himself.
It was not just an embarrassing episode for both Fox News personalities, but perfectly illustrated how Trump gets a complete pass from conservative media for precisely the same trollish behavior. And of course, it elicited a very Trumpian reply from “Newsom’s Press Office” brutally mocking a news anchor:
At this point he’s shooting fish in a barrel.
Newsom’s feed isn’t Trumpian—it’s an X-ray of Trumpian excess, but as if it were delivered by the king of ironically detached comedy himself, Steve Martin. Newsom didn’t just enter the arena of schoolyard retorts; he grabbed the microphone, turned it upside down, and made the absurd impossible to ignore. (And along the way, we’ve learned something about ourselves.)
What makes this even more stunning of political insult battle development is that over the past decade, Democrats have been completely clueless! They’d forgotten that partisan narratives aren’t about being nuanced or sober — they’re about being heard. Particularly in today’s attention economy. Trump mastered it. Death-by-press-release doesn’t cut it in a media ecosystem addicted to meme velocity and cartoon rage.
Newsom cracked that code by parody. Fox News taking the bait only proves its been a wild success.
And it’s not only comedy. This comes amid a very serious redistricting warfare, where Republican-led states like Texas gerrymander mid-decade. Newsom’s all-caps response threatens a “trigger” map in California, Is it satire or strategy, or both? Just like Trump’s feed, we’ll never know – and its probably a bit of both in one package.
And its not just social media feeds where Newsom is flipping the script. For the most part, Democrats have long flinched at lawsuits against the media out of respect for the First Amendment. Well, guess what happened? Trump weaponized suing news outlets for not just profit, but narrative gain. And Newsom’s doing the same — suing Fox News for defamation, demanding retractions and commanding headlines in the process. And in case the metaphor is lost, the amount sought in damages is $787.5 million. That just happens to be the amount that Fox News paid off to Dominion Voting Systems for their misreporting.
To be clear, this is not heroism on Newsom’s part. Just savvy and entertaining replication.
Obviously this all suggests serious political plans in 2028, but Newsom has serious policy baggage in his home state of California. Among them: housing costs, homelessness, crime, among many other serious issues. But that’s a conversation for another day, ideally much closer to primaries. In this weird issue, he wins — or at least competes — where Democrats were knocked out: the theater of attention.
By parodying Trump’s tone, Newsom exposes absurdity. The joke is the point: hold up the mirror, watch people recoil. That reaction reveals the double standard; what Trump gets away with is punished when a Democrat does it. That asymmetry has fueled political advantage for years.
Does this scale beyond trolling? Will it win hearts and minds? Unknown. But the narrative war? Suddenly, Democrats aren’t losing by yesterday’s rules. Newsom’s feed may not fix policy, but it rewrites the stage. And in today’s politics, that’s the opening move.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
