Trump Can't Shake Gavin
Gavin Newsom is fighting where the fight is.
For too long, Democrats fought Donald Trump’s online sewage geyser with policy briefs and polite fact-checks. Trump had the meme factories producing dank memes and viral videos at scale; Democrats had PDFs and anodyne LinkedIn posts.
One side was playing pro-wrestling, the other side was handing out actuarial tables.
Guess who won?
Trump, the great orange content monster, always understood that politics today is less about policy than spectacle. His whole act, the Truth Social tantrums, dollar-store paranoid agitporn stolen from conspiracy forums, AI memes and videos of a hypermasculine, muscular Trump dripping testosterone instead of oleaginous ham-sweat, his weird obsession with caps-lock, and thankyouforyourattentiontothis wasn’t background noise.
It was the product. For nearly a decade, Democrats acted like they were too dignified to get in the mud. Meanwhile, Trump was gleefully rolling around in it, hurling it at anyone who got close, and laughing as it stuck.
Enter Gavin Newsom.
Say what you will about his West Coast aura, but he’s figured something out: You have to fight where the fight is. Newsom’s social media campaign is not about “elevating the discourse.” It’s about taking Trump’s carnival of idiocy and holding up a mirror so America can see just how grotesque the show really is.
And here’s the thing: it works.