Why Gavin Newsom is gambling on new rules for Trump 2.0

At the beginning of the year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s tenure was marked by devastating wildfires in Los Angeles, a steady stream of ridicule from the White House, and backlash from within the Democratic Party for siding with conservatives on transgender athletes in women’s sports.

Not to mention, in the summer of 2021, Newsom weathered a blistering attempt to recall him from office — his starpower at risk.

Yet the twice-elected governor has pulled off a reputational heel turn, marked by viral Trump-mocking social media posts and parody MAGA merch coupled with a statewide redistricting measure that would level Republican’s attempt to get an edge ahead of next year’s midterms.

Now, Newsom is a leader running miles ahead of others, experts explained to ABC News. 

One of the most noticeable transformations was the rebrand of Newsom’s official governor social media account. A senior Newsom official told ABC that the weekend of June 6, when the team learned the president was federalizing the National Guard into Los Angeles, was when the “red line” was crossed, and a more defiant version of the Democratic governor debuted. 

“That is when everything changed, with the governor, with our social media,” the official said.

On June 10, Newsom’s @GovPressOffice account shared a TikTok video, where a voiceover, in the style of a Star Wars villain, mimicked Trump’s TruthSocial post announcing the federalization of troops. That post generated over 800,000 views. 

The salvo continued. The same day, Newsom, on Instagram, responded to Trump mocking him as “Newscum” on Truth Social with a diss-video set to the Taylor Swift (another common Trump target) song “You Need To Calm Down,” dismissing Trump as “keyboard warrior.” That short video has 11.3 million views. 

The mocking never let up. 

‘Newsom Derangement Syndrome’

A non-exhaustive list of the incoming includes: accusing Trump of having “Newsom Derangement Syndrome,” a play on Trump’s oft-referred “Trump Derangement Syndrome;” likening Trump adviser Stephen Miller to Voldemort, the villain from the Harry Potter series, and calling him submissive; calling Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “Kosplay Kristi” and urging followers to “hide yo dogs,” a reference to Noem’s infamous tale of shooting and killing her own dog, Cricket; mocking Vice President JD Vance over a debunked rumor that he performed sex acts with a couch; and comparing White House border czar Tom Homan to an uncooked ham. 

Since then, Newsom’s social media accounts have skyrocketed. Follower counts across multiple platforms for his non-government account, @GavinNewsom, ballooned — growing to more than 11 million followers collectively. Nearly half of those followers were new this year.

One of the official accounts, @GovPressOffice, has seen nearly 1 billion impressions on X since those first provocative posts in June, per Newsom’s campaign. 

Newsom even launched his own “patriot” merchandise shop, repurposing Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan — Make America Gavin Again — and selling REAL PATRIOT hats NEWSOM WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING! And REAL PATRIOT hats, and kneepads marked with Trump’s signature. 

A key mark in Newsom’s success is upending the “when they go low, we go high” mantra coined by Michelle Obama in 2016, suggested Parker Butler, the former director of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign’s buzzy social media channel, @KamalaHQ. “That is not where we are right now.”

‘It feels very unrestrained’

“When we see democracy hanging by a thread, we have to take risks. It feels very unrestrained, that’s the kind of energy that I think Democrats need,” said Butler, now a digital strategist and co-founder at Luminary Strategies. 

“We need to throw the sort of old rulebook out the window,” Butler added.

When Newsom launched his new solo podcast “This is Gavin Newsom” in March, he said he wanted to “debate without demeaning” and engage with people most members his party wouldn’t dare to speak to. He called the Democratic brand “toxic.” He’s positioned himself as a lefty alternative in the GOP-de-jour manosphere space. His interview with Charlie Kirk, for instance, has 1.3 million YouTube views. 

“When we go low, or when they go low, we go high, doesn’t work when they’re trying to pull the rug out completely from under us,” said Olivia Julianna, a Gen-Z digital strategist and activist who spoke at the Democratic National Convention. Julianna was outraged with Newsom at the start of the year, in part due to his right-wing podcast guests, but she now considers herself a huge fan — she’s even bought his merch. 

“I did not take Gavin Newsom seriously until he made it clear that he was ready to take action,” Julianna added.

‘Holding a mirror to the clown show’

Newsom’s longtime speechwriter and former deputy chief of staff Jason Eliott described the online mockery as a strategy of “holding up a mirror to the clown show that is the Trump administration. We’re not doing anything differently than what they are doing.” 

Elliott said the buzz around Newsom’s posts creates space for the “actual substantive work,” like Proposition 50, the ballot initiative that, if approved by voters on Tuesday, will temporarily adopt a new congressional map that redraws five districts to be more Democratic-leaning, potentially flipping five existing Republican seats in the midterms. Elliott said that since the office has sharpened its tone, donations have poured in from millions of supporters. 

“How do you get 1.2 million people from all 50 states all across the country to buy into this defense of democracy? You do it by getting attention,” Eliott said. 

Newsom, in a recent interview with ABC News’ Jonathan Karl, concurred. 

“We’re trying to have a little humor in this process as well, and we’re fighting fire with fire, not just rhetorically, in the context of that back and forth, but substantively, we can get into the 43 lawsuits, we can get in the work we’re trying to do on Prop 50,” Newsom explained.

John Dennis, former chair of the San Francisco Republican Party, said Newsom’s tactic is the latest iteration of what he and other critics call a history of “shapeshifting.”

“He doesn’t know who he is. So he’s trying to be everybody else,” Dennis said. 

But he admits it appears to be working.

“This Prop 50 move is a very clever move for the Democrats. And he’s got good people around him,” Dennis said. “They know that Trump is the center of the universe right now so he’s just keeping his name alive and positioning himself as the Trump fighter — and he’s going to run that all the way into the Democrat primaries.”

Dan Schnur, a longtime California political analyst and UC-Berkeley professor, called the Proposition 50 campaign “a self-delivered political gift for Newsom.”

Newsom’s successes put him in a solid position to launch a presidential bid, an ambition Californians are under no illusions about.

“Every governor looks in the mirror and sees a president looking back at them, and Newsom probably whistles “Hail to the Chief” when he’s in the shower every morning,” Schnur said. “It’s hard to predict exactly how the race plays out, but the governor of the largest state in the country, who is also the most visible and impactful Trump critic, and who has access to tremendous amounts of fundraising dollars could be a pretty formidable contender.”