Unboiling Frogs

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Getting elected president partly explains why Newsom is leaning into his “Trump, but progressive” online persona, of course, but there are other methods to his madness. If you’re grasping for virtuous reasons to relish the cheap laughs he’s generating at the president’s expense, I can supply one.

In his own ridiculous way, he’s trying to unboil America’s frogs.

Winning through trolling.

Newsom’s immediate goal in aping Trump is to gain attention for the redistricting fight that he’s setting up in California this fall.

If he can’t convince a heavily blue state to fight fire with fire by redrawing its own House maps to offset what Texas is doing, his 2028 prospects will fade. Why would Democratic voters follow Newsom into battle nationally if he can’t win a war on his home turf, with the electorate stacked in his favor?

The risk of failure is real. A Politico poll published last week found just 36 percent of Californians want to return redistricting authority to the state legislature, versus 64 percent who prefer the current independent commission to remain in charge. The average American dislikes hyper-partisan gerrymandering in principle; the governor has less than three months until Election Day to change that.

So he’s pulling out all the stops to rapidly educate Democrats about the stakes. Along with traditional campaigning, Newsom’s anti-Trump social media spectacle is plainly designed to drive public attention to his case for redistricting. There’s no way to prove that it’s working, but if you believe the governor’s internal polling, it sure isn’t hurting.

If he succeeds, some Democratic voters will discern in his victory a lesson for 2028. “Fighting” like Trump works, and Gavin Newsom has mastered the art better than anyone on the left

That would be the wrong lesson—it works in a 60-40 Democratic state, perhaps, not necessarily in a 50-50 country—but one can understand why watching the governor go on offense might appeal to a party that’s been on its heels since November. As strange and incongruous as it may seem that Newsom is tweeting nonsense at the moment that Trump’s authoritarian menace has grown more serious, it makes sense in context. Mocking the emperor for having no clothes feels more impressive when the emperor is throwing his weight around, and highlighting his clownishness makes it that much more shameful when others meekly knuckle under to him.

The governor is effectively belittling an enemy who can’t stand being belittled, he’s getting under Republicans’ skin in doing so, and he’s cleverly seduced left-wing influencers into promoting him by inspiring them to join in the meme-making merriment. He’s “fighting,” in other words, and his party has taken note. “Democrats are over being the ‘nice guy’ party,” former Kamala Harris spokesman Jamal Simmons told The Hill. “Gavin Newsom is capturing the hearts and minds of Democrats. People who don’t do politics for a living are asking about him, and they really like him.”

The left at last has a Trump of its own—or a satirical simulacrum of one, at least.

But Newsom’s resemblance to the president runs deeper than mimicking his rhetoric and fondness for all-caps. The secret sauce of Donald Trump’s political appeal has always been blending moderation on policy to woo the center with boisterous contempt for the other party to woo the right. He proved that Republicans will tolerate virtually any betrayal of ideological principle as long as it comes packaged with visceral cultural hostility toward the left.

Quietly, the governor is now following a similar approach. “I have a lot of doubts about Gavin Newsom as a presidential prospect,” liberal pundit Matt Yglesias wrote recently, “but the moves he’s made this year—leaning into hardcore partisanship while moving to the center on certain policy issues—is the smart path forward for anyone.” Newsom has sounded moderate on trans rights, signed legislation to make it easier to build new housing, and approved a budget that will scale back health care for illegal immigrants, yet leftists across the spectrum have spent the past week cheering him on for his online Trump-baiting.

Hate your opponent enough and your base will let you do what you want to do in governing: That’s the MAGA model, and Newsom is testing it out on the left. He’s purchasing cheap grace from progressives ahead of a pivot to the center in 2028 by winning the “contempt for Trump” Olympics now.

But he’s also “holding up a mirror” to the country and asking it if it likes what it sees.

Leaning into idiocracy.

Asked last week why he had resorted to Trump mimicry, the governor was happy to explain.

“I’m just following his example. If you have issues with what I’m putting out, you sure as hell should have concerns with what he’s putting out as president,” he told reporters. “To the extent it’s gotten some attention, I’m pleased, but I think the deeper question is how have we allowed the normalization of his tweets, Truth Social posts, over the course of the last many years to go without similar scrutiny and notice?”

Gavin Newsom is trying to unboil America’s boiled frogs. By code-switching from standard politician-ese to the president’s juvenile boasting and boorish self-promotion, he’s hoping to awaken a population that long ago went numb to such things to the fact that this isn’t how leaders of a respectable country behave.

And amazingly, it seems to be working.

Trump supporters are grousing about it. Multiple White House spokesmen have publicly complained. And at least twice in the past week, hosts at Fox News—of all places—have scolded Newsom on air for conduct unbecoming of a high government official. “It comes across as childish,” anchor Trace Gallagher said of Newsom’s tweets. “You are the governor of the biggest state in the union. What are you doing?” The Five panelist Dana Perino went further: “If I were his wife, I would say you are making a fool of yourself, stop it,” she said. “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.”

He does not, in fact, have to be “a little bit more serious” to win the biggest job America has to offer. That’s the most basic empirical lesson one can take from the last decade of politics in this rotten country. A leader can be as unserious as he likes and not only might he win the presidency, Fox News will do everything in its power to help him stage a coup to hold onto it—provided that he has an “R” after his name.

This is why I’m enjoying Newsom’s trolling. Ultimately, it’s less a goof on Trump than on the contemptible Americans who’ve enabled him, from the paid apologists of the MAGA Republican establishment to the salt-of-the-earth right-wingers who’ve learned to forgive the president about literally anything in the name of endless war on the left. The California governor’s Trump-ish tweets are a sort of meta-joke on how utterly modern partisanship has blinded partisans. All it takes to expose stupid, unacceptable rhetoric as stupid and unacceptable is to change the identity of the speaker. Instantly, everything becomes clear.

“In some ways, it’s like peering into the near future of what a post-literate presidential campaign might look like,” Politico wrote of Newsom’s trolling, in one of the more dystopian sentences about American politics that I’ve encountered lately. But it’s true: Essentially, the governor is leaning into idiocracy. Populism has convinced Americans that oafish demagoguery is “authentic” and should be rewarded with leadership, and one Democrat has decided—with tongue in cheek—to show them where that logic leads. If populists want a country where everyone sounds like Trump (insofar as we don’t have one already), that can be arranged.

And if populists don’t want that, great. That’s progress. They shouldn’t.

“Turnabout is fair play” is an interesting and provocative message for a 2028 Democratic hopeful, especially in contrast to Joe Biden’s 2020 “return to normalcy” campaign. Trolling won’t win Newsom the general election, but the fact that he’s willing to use the president’s rhetorical tactics against the right may carry outsized weight in the next Democratic primary. Whether for reasons of partisan revenge or of ideological ruthlessness, a lot of leftists will want their new leader to aggressively exploit the abuses of power that Trump has normalized. By using the president’s rhetoric, the governor is hinting that he’s game.

If Newsom will fight fire with fire on everything from redistricting to presidential tweets, presumably, he’ll also fight fire with fire by using executive power to strong-arm the left’s enemies into accepting his side’s cultural priorities, too. Which brings us back to those reasons I mentioned earlier to despise Newsom’s trolling campaign after all.

Gazing into the abyss.

“Trump, but progressive” is no Dispatch writer’s or reader’s idea of actual progress. Illiberalism is illiberalism. If you’re destined to be governed by one of the ends of the proverbial horseshoe, it’s silly to care much which one it is.

Goofing on Trump also isn’t going to do a thing to reverse the ongoing collapse in Democratic Party identification. You can and should draw some hard conclusions about Americans from the fact that the GOP in its current incarnation is becoming more popular, not less, but that still doesn’t make jokey tweets any kind of serious answer to the problem. There will be no “troll lane” in the next Democratic primary.

Insofar as the governor’s mockery of the president makes him a frontrunner for the 2028 nomination, that’s another reason to hate it. If you’re eager to defeat whatever populist monstrosity Trumpism spawns in the next presidential cycle, you should oppose nominating Gavin Newsom. It’s nice that he wants to rebrand as a Trump-hating centrist, but the last election also involved a California progressive desperately trying to convince swing voters that she wasn’t as far-left as her record suggested. It didn’t work for Kamala Harris, and it won’t work for him.

The deeper cultural reason to dislike what he’s doing, though, is that trolling rarely remains trolling.

Hannah Yoest noted today at The Bulwark that some of the pro-Newsom online mockery aimed at Trump and MAGA by left-wingers has already begun to veer away from irony and toward cruelty. One popular tweet made light of the president’s near-assassination last year. Another spoofed white nationalists’ habit of disparaging mixed-race couples by placing a photo of the governor’s lily-white family next to one of J.D. Vance’s. The joke was that far-left Gavin Newsom represents the Aryan ideal, not our far-right vice president, but in substance, the post was indistinguishable from earnest racist propaganda.

A Dispatch colleague reminded me today that during the 2016 cycle, when the alt-right became a pro-Trump force on social media, it was sometimes hard to tell committed white supremacists from bratty trolls free-riding on the excuse provided by the election to be transgressive. Was Pepe the Frog a sincere symbol of white power, or a comic meme glommed onto by teen edgelords to épater les bourgeoisie?

Nine years later, racist rhetoric on social media seems a lot more earnest than it used to. Eventually, it appears, the trolls lost their ironic distance from their subject. “If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you,” Nietzsche famously said. Here we are.

Trumpism is a reminder that many people are looking for excuses to be cruel to their enemies and will warm to ideologies that grant them moral license to behave accordingly. It will take much more than Gavin Newsom’s dopey trolling exercise to grant that license to Democrats—he’s trying to raise, not lower, American standards for political civility by mocking their degradation—but you can see from this episode how a more earnest “Trump, but progressive” demagogue might gain traction by inviting liberals to lean harder into their contempt for Republicans.

The governor wants to unboil the country’s right-wing frogs. One of his rivals might have better success boiling the left’s. We can do worse than Newsom, and might. But enjoy his tweets for now, as the shelf life on this gag can probably be measured in days rather than weeks. Even the best jokes get stale quickly.