By CLINTON FEIN
August 23, 2025

You can’t beat an asshole by being polite. It was almost ten years ago, in July 2016, that Michelle Obama uttered the memorable reminder to Democrats: “When they go low, we go high.” An aphorism so momentarily relevant that even she had abandoned it by 2024 as Donald Trump, MAGA, and right-wing media all went subterranean.

It has been frustrating to watch Democrats earnestly arriving with their strongly worded  Chuck Schumer-style letters to an outrage-driven meme war driven by frothing, unhinged right-wing trolls, MAGA morons, snarky sycophants, media propagandists and Russian bots.

But something beautiful is emerging from the Golden State to counter the faux gold-plated rot destroying the soul of America, embodied by a Neanderthal occupying the White House.

The internationally recognized governor of the world’s fourth-largest economy, Gavin Fucking Newsom of California, has cracked the code.

If you haven’t been following, Newsom has been systematically mocking Trump’s social media presence with the same ice-cool precision that Hannibal Lecter employed to bring Clarice Starling to tears. He’s appropriated every element of Trump’s digital persona—the unhinged ALL-CAPS rants, the nauseating self-congratulations, the schoolyard bullying, the immature name-calling, the weird, inconsistent capitalizations, and weaponized them against their originator. He’s flooding feeds with images of himself looking like Captain America’s jacked-up, imminently more fuckable cousin while Trump resembles a tangerine dyed melting wax figure sculpted by Fernando Botero and left too close to a space heater.

And holy shit, talk about slaying.

The MAGA ecosystem is absolutely losing its collective shit over it. Fox News hosts are sputtering with indignation. Right-wing commentators are working overtime to explain why Newsom’s trolling is somehow less authentic than Trump’s. These are the same people who worship a spray-tanned, bewigged, serial bankruptcy-filing real estate huckster from Queens who pretends to be a blue-collar champion while shitting in moldy gold spray-painted toilets, and they’re opining on Newsom’s authenticity?

They’re accusing Newsom of “copying” Trump (no fucking shit, Sherlock) while simultaneously claiming he lacks substance. Kvetching that he should be focused on governing rather than social media. Criticism levelled by people who worship a man who doesn’t know the difference between a trade deal and a tweet, and whose most profound policy position is “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”

Laugh-inducing self-identifying “alpha males” such as Fox News’s Jesse Watters can’t slather on enough makeup or stifle enough high-pitched, whiny-little-bitch panic that Newsom’s breaking through. Infuriated Hannity bloviating on-air about the governor’s mockery of the president breaching decorum. The snowflakes are melting faster than Elphaba being shoved under the Niagara Falls. The idiots accusing him of just playing Trump’s game don’t realize that he just rewrote the entire rulebook and then tossed it out the window.

The beautiful irony here is that every pearl-clutching segment on Fox and OAN, every outraged tweet from MAGA influencers, every minute spent dissecting Newsom’s strategy is exactly what he wants. They’re amplifying his message while diminishing Trump’s. They’re giving him free airtime. They’re making him the main character in a story where Trump is supposed to be the protagonist. They’ve been snookered, where every criticism they hurl at Newsom may just as well be at Trump.

Ever since Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend descended the escalator into the 2016 presidential race, dragging America into the gutter, politicians and rivals on the left and right have tried to take him on, with a parade of embarrassing failures. Remember Marco Rubio looking like a used, pocket-sized dildo trying to make dick jokes that made him look like a shrill, thirsty size queen? Or Ron DeSantis with his painful attempts at alpha male posturing, only to gingerly prance through the swamps of Florida in white, knee-high, plastic cha-cha boots screeching about owning the gays and showing Disney?

They all tried lowering themselves to Trump’s level without understanding that the bullying, the insults, the name-calling, the cruelty, the narcissism, the bragging, the grievance airing, and the whining are components of Trump’s personal brand. It may be boorish and brash, with sprinkles of “aww shucks, I’m a good guy” relatability thrown in to soften the edges and hide the jaw-dropping lack of curiosity, cultural ignorance, his rudimentary education, high school vocabulary, unsophisticated speech patterns and cognitive decline. Still, he’s a media-savvy, accountability-evading psychological phenomenon that has been elected twice and has done more damage to America’s institutions than any individual in living memory. You can’t beat him by underestimating him. You definitely can’t beat him by mimicking him poorly.

What makes Newsom’s approach different and so devastatingly effective is that he’s not just mimicking Trump; he understands the nuances, and he’s improving on the formula. He’s smarter, more strategic, and infinitely better looking by magnitude (which shouldn’t matter but absolutely does in our image-obsessed political culture). He’s taking Trump’s playbook and executing it with the precision Trump himself could never achieve because Trump is, at his core, an undisciplined narcissist operating on grievance, vengeance, spite and blinding insecurity, surrounded by a cadre of spineless, obsequious sycophants who are too petrified of him to dare tell him the truth.

The reason watching this unfold is so profoundly satisfying is that authoritarians cannot abide mockery. Even for someone as thin-skinned as Donald Trump, criticism, scandal, and legal challenges are part of the package, welcomed even, because the focus remains on the narcissist. But mockery? Ridicule is kryptonite to fragile men like Trump because their entire persona is built on projecting strength and dominance. When you successfully make them the butt of the joke, you’re not just attacking their politics; you’re undermining their entire identity.

By stripping away the mystique and exposing the absurdity, Newsom is doing politically what South Park has done, and continues to do culturally, turning Trump into more of a punchline than a threat. Once people start laughing at you instead of fearing you, the mythology begins to shatter. He’s revealing that the emperor has no clothes, along with the intellect of a hillbilly on meth and the physique of a partially deflated parade balloon.

The Democratic establishment — and frankly, much of the left-wing independent media sphere — has spent the last eight months wringing its hands about finding a left version of Joe Rogan as a panacea for all its woes, as if we’re still operating in a political environment where norms matter. His unqualified, incompetent cabinet, which knows more about Ozempic, cosmetic surgery, and makeup, wreaks death, havoc, cruelty and destruction on America, its friends and allies, while bending over backwards to protect the Trumpstein files from seeing the light of day.

Gavin Newsom saw the gap and took it. And unlike Trump, Newsom is in on the joke. Will this approach help solve climate change or improve healthcare? Of course not. However, suppose people think Newsom’s gambit is just a one-trick pony that distracts from his responsibilities as governor? They should watch him sign the redistricting plan he mobilized to get onto the ballot in response to Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s capitulation on redistricting, which he used to try to steal seats at the behest of the corrupt fraudster who is polling underwater on every single issue, including his signature immigration policy.

Politics isn’t just about policy. It’s about power. And you can’t implement a single fucking policy if you can’t win elections. What Newsom understands, and what too many Democrats still don’t, is that in the age of social media and increasingly short attention spans, tweaking algorithms, flooding feeds and controlling the narrative is more than half the battle.

Newsom is out there fighting fire with a flamethrower. The bully is finally getting a taste of his own medicine, and it turns out neither he nor MAGA world can handle it for shit. For the first time since Trump upended politics by cheapening it and dragging it into the mud, disparaging real war heroes, spitting on Gold Star families, branding Mexicans as rapists and bullying disabled reporters, it feels like someone finally knows how to play the game to counter him. Even better.

And that’s why Gavin Newsom is winning.