Newsom's Trumpy tweets rile the MAGA base - MAGAReport 8/16/25

The Governor's trolling has gotten under the skin of the hard core MAGAs, but they don't quite get what's going on

Gavin Newsom’s office has been engaging in a Trump trolling campaign, the likes of which we have never seen. Check them out if you would like to see for yourself (and yes, this is the official account of the California Governor’s office and not a parody account).

We’re going to look at how a recent post is getting under the MAGAs’ skin, but I’ll share a few more at the end of this post so you can sample them. Buzzfeed also has a nice listicle of them.

This post, shared shortly after the press conference that followed the Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska yesterday, made its way on to the MAGA discussion boards and boy are they mad. The discussion has more than 450 replies in the last 12 hours; that’s a very high level of activity in these spaces.

“Gavin Newscum goes full retard. Never go full retard.” reads the post title over the tweet’s screenshot, the first of many suggestions that they are close to getting it, but not all the way there.

• He seems unhinged

• What an immature reaction from a governor.

• Is he ok?? 😟

• Greasy Gavin is schizo posting now?

There are a few themes in the replies. They know that he is using Trump’s style, but some seem to think he is doing it to gain clout or steal his style. They don’t seem to understand that Newsom is mocking him.

• Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

• Yeah. Dude wants to be Trump so bad

  • From JEN: There was an interesting sub comment here: “who doesn’t?”

• Trump's the only one that can be Trump. Simple as that.

• It's like when a comedian steals another comedians material. In his mind the material stealer knows the material's good, so there's no reason why he wouldn't kill it every night with those jokes, but in reality he has nothing original that's worth a shit and can only ride coat tails..

• This is so pathetic. They totally miss why Trump's talk works. They're just aping him.

• Leftists think playing the Trump handbook will give them power, but it won't even work for other Republicans.

  When other politicians curse it just comes off as trashy, insincere, and crude.

  Trump is something else.

• Trump is so powerful the only path his enemies see is to imitate him. Total GEOTUS victory!

• Ha ha he’s trying to sound like Trump! Nice try fag!

• Newscum is trying to copy Trump's persona, how cute, LOL.

• He's trying to play Trump. Using his style and candor. Not a retard, but rather a fake and dead Parrot if I can use that Monty Python reference.

Another theme is the accusation that ChatGPT is writing these posts. “The person who wrote it was AI. You can tell by the over use of the dash --. It's simple to prompt the AI to write in the style of someone known like Geotus” [FROM JEN: “GEOTUS” stands for “God Emperor Of The United States”]. The anti-AI part of the reaction is rich because I cannot overstate how much AI-generated content is all over these forums. It’s so extensive that I’ve been plotting out a research paper about it that I will work on in the fall. They seem to have no general objection to AI as a way to generate social media content, but they are happy to treat it as derisible if they other side uses it.

Also, for what it’s worth, ChatGPT won’t generate a post like this:

But Grok (the Twitter AI engine) will:

There is also a lot of agreement that this style of writing is bad. Again, they don’t seem to connect that Trump writes exactly like this.

• nobody is going to read his wall of barf.

• HOLY CAPS LOCK BATMAN.

• If Newsom actually said that, he's insane.

• Ah yeah that’s why it reads so incoherently. Checks out

At least one user got it, writing, “It's a political ploy to win attention and media coverage while also annoying Trump and elevating Newscum to Trump's level as if he's a legitimate antagonist to Trump. But if Newcum's stupid Trump-style tweets actually do irritate the president then he (Newscum) will win a lot of support from people who hate Trump. That's the play.”

And finally, just the fact that there is so much discourse about this post shows how deeply it is getting under their skin. I think a hallmark of this community is that they say things they don’t believe because it makes them sound “based” - committed to the ideology, and unwavering in their support of Trump. Surely, plenty of the posters in this forum know that Newsom is trolling trump and he’s doing it well. None of them admit it because, I think, they know that mockery is an important tool for undermining authoritarians. I think it scares them that this may be working.

More tweets for you: