It is no secret that Gov. Gavin Newsom relishes opportunities to get into political scuffles with Donald Trump and the White House, but lately, the California Democrat and his team have taken this to an unexpected level with a new online strategy.
This tactics have hardly been subtle: Newsom’s office recently started using social media to mock the president by emulating the president, publishing missives that are clearly intended to mimic Trump’s hysterical tone and ridiculous writing style. (Some of the missives even conclude, “Thank you for your attention to this very important matter!!!” echoing the Republican.)
The content is deliberately rude, brash, self-aggrandizing and insulting — because it’s satirizing the president who uses his own social media platform to push rude, brash, self-aggrandizing and insulting content.
Some of Newsom’s conservative critics appear to be missing the point of the effort.
One Fox News host complained late last week that the governor’s online content “comes across as childish” and seems unbecoming of someone who’s “the governor of the biggest state in the union.” As HuffPost noted, a different Fox News host kept this going earlier this week.
‘You have to stop it with the Twitter thing,’ [former White House press secretary Dana] Perino said, before adding: ‘I don’t know where his wife is.’ … ‘If I were [Newsom’s] wife, I would say, ‘You are making a fool of yourself, stop it’ … He’s got a big job as governor of California, but if he wants an even bigger job, he has to be a little bit more serious.’
By all appearances, she was quite sincere.
In keeping with the shtick, Newsom’s office published a follow-up item specifically responding to the Fox News co-host’s criticism in the same way Trump tends to respond to his own media critics.
This really shouldn’t be necessary, but let’s go ahead and make this plain: The governor’s social media team is doing a surprisingly good job sounding eerily similar to Trump. If it were me, I’d probably add a few more grammatical errors — the president has, for example, struggled to properly spell words like “tap” — but the tone and style are spot-on.
Whether the right understands this or not, to criticize Team Newsom’s content as childish, foolish and fundamentally unserious is to necessarily criticize Trump’s content as childish, foolish and fundamentally unserious since the former emulates the latter.
A Politico report summarized the developments this way: “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.”
Or as the governor’s office put it, “ALMOST A WEEK IN AND THEY STILL DON’T GET IT.”
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
