Even Steve Bannon Admits Gavin Newsom’s Trump Trolling Is Pretty Good

Nobody is getting under MAGA skin like California Governor Gavin Newsom.

The Democratic bully-for-good has been on a social media crusade this week, rising to the top of algorithmic feeds by parodying Donald Trump’s posting style and his attention-grabbing stunts. Some of those low-brow trolling efforts include reposting a photoshopped image of Mount Rushmore with Newsom’s face on it, a mock-up of Newsom as a king on the cover of Time magazine, as well as an AI-hatched depiction of Newsom surrounded by Tucker Carlson, the late Hulk Hogan, and Kid Rock (and then writing in all-caps that he hates Kid Rock.)

The déjà vu is intended to serve as a jarring mirror for Republicans still allied with the authoritarian president, and, incredibly, it’s working.

“He’s trying to mimic President Trump,” Trump’s first term chief strategist Steve Bannon told Politico Playbook. “He’s no Trump, but if you look at the Democratic Party, he’s at least getting up there, and he’s trying to imitate a Trumpian vision of fighting, right? He looks like the only person in the Democratic Party who is organizing a fight that they feel they can win.”

“People in the MAGA movement and the America First movement should start paying attention to this, because it’s not going to go away, they’re only going to get more intense,” Bannon added.

The California governor’s social media strategy is a novel one for Democrats, fighting the right’s AI-generated slop with even more AI-generated slop. In one particularly viral post, Newsom ragged on the president’s latest variant of “covfefe,” mocking Trump for posting “bela” to his most frequented communication platform, Truth Social.

“DONALD (TINY HANDS), HAS WRITTEN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY THIS MORNING—UNFORTUNATELY (LOW IQ) HE SPELLED IT WRONG—‘BETA,’” Newsom wrote. “SOON YOU WILL BE A ‘FIRED’ BETA BECAUSE OF MY PERFECT, ‘BEAUTIFUL MAPS.’ THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!—GCN”

Newsom, in his own words, has “changed.”

“The facts have changed; [Democrats] need to change,” Newsom told Fox LA’s Elex Michaelson Tuesday.

Breaking character momentarily during a press conference last week, Newsom said that he hoped the dumbed-down antics would serve as a “wake-up call for the president of the United States.”

“I’m sort of following his example. If you’ve got issues with what I’m putting out, you sure as hell should have concerns about what he’s putting out as president,” Newsom continued. “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?”

Newsom’s nonsense has ruffled feathers all the way to the Oval Office. Asked for a request to comment to Politico, the White House issued what could be the first official statement in meme format.

Draft dodger Donald Trump claimed to be a “war hero” while gushing similarly about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

While calling in to The Mark Levin Show Tuesday night, Trump defended his old pal “Bibi”—and took the opportunity to pat himself on the back too. 

“He’s a good man, he’s in there fighting. He’s fighting, you know they’re trying to put him in jail on top of everything else. How about that? He’s—he’s a war hero, because we worked together. He’s a war hero, I guess I am too. Nobody cares, but I am too, I mean, I sent those planes,” Trump said, likely referring to his controversial strike on nuclear facilities in Iran.   

But Netanyahu isn’t a war hero—he’s a war criminal accused of committing crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court, which has issued a warrant for his arrest. Netanyahu’s sweeping military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 60,000 people, including civilians, children, and journalists. Incarcerated Palestinians in Israel have reported horrific torture and abuse at the hands of their captors, according to the United Nations. Israel’s destruction of Gaza has displaced nearly two million Palestinians and resulted in a widespread famine that threatens to kill thousands more. 

Earlier this month, Trump and Netanyahu reportedly got into a shouting match over the phone when the Israeli leader tried to claim that there was no starvation in Gaza. But less than a month later, Trump is back to singing his praises—and trying to take credit for the violence he has sown. 

And Trump is far from a war hero himself, no matter how many conflicts he claims to have resolved—and being complicit in Netanyahu’s war crimes certainly isn’t helping. 

President Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi has clashed with ethics officials over her openness to accepting gifts and favors—something her boss also struggles with mightily.

The New Yorker has reported that Bondi argued with ethics folks over keeping a FIFA soccer ball, sitting in President Trump’s box at the FIFA Club World Cup at MetLife Stadium, and holding onto a box of cigars that MMA fighter and convicted rapist Conor McGregor had initially given to Trump. Bondi ended up sitting in the box seats.

“Every new Administration needs time to adjust to ethics rules that might seem trivial,” one source told The New Yorker. “What wasn’t normal was the amount of pushback that we got.”

A DOJ official told The New Republic that “whenever the AG receives any item, DOJ staff consults with ethics officials as required and fully complies with their guidance—this isn’t newsworthy or controversial.”

DOJ protocol, though, only allows employees to accept “gifts of $20 or less per occasion, not to exceed $50 in a year from one source.”

The woman in charge of the DOJ has already eclipsed that with just one gift, as those FIFA Club World Cup box seats with Trump ran anywhere between from $5,300 to $73,000.

But this kind of blatant corruption seems to be par for the course from the administration. Bondi has yet to comment on The New Yorker’s reporting.

This story has been updated.

California Republicans have filed a lawsuit in hopes of halting Governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to fight the Texas GOP’s Trump-ordered gerrymandering with retaliatory redistricting in the Golden State.

As Texas Republicans make a Machiavellian move between censuses to rejigger congressional maps in their party’s favor ahead of the 2026 midterms, Newsom has unveiled a tit-for-tat legislative package dubbed the “Election Rigging Response Act,” or ERRA. Newsom’s plan would redraw California’s maps to offset GOP gerrymandering in Texas or other red states.

In hopes of putting the new maps before California voters in a November 4 special election, state Democrats have expedited the process using a common legislative tactic known as “gut and amend”—in which the content of an existing, unrelated bill was replaced with the redistricting proposal.

Floor votes on the ERRA are expected to take place later this week. But not if California Republicans legislators can help it.

On Tuesday, four Republican legislators in California filed an emergency petition with the state’s Supreme Court, claiming that Newsom’s effort violates the state’s requirement that pieces of legislation undergo a 30-day review period after being introduced.

The lawmakers’ 411-page petition asks that the Supreme Court stay any legislative action on the ERRA for 30 days. Their case will hinge on whether California Democrats’ use of “gut and amend” lawfully bypassed the 30-day hold.

Notably, the Republican lawmakers do not challenge “the use of gut and amend for all purposes,” their petition states; their concern “is confined to the narrow case where the Legislature blatantly and intentionally uses it to circumvent a constitutional right of the people to adequate time to review proposed legislation.”

One of the Republican litigant-legislators, State Assemblyman Tri Ta, accused California Democrats of having “effectively shut voters out of engaging in their own legislative process.”

Responding to the lawsuit, a Newsom spokesperson has told the press: “Republicans are filing a deeply unserious (and truly laughable) lawsuit to stop Americans from voting? We’re neither surprised, nor worried.”

Of course, if California Republicans are looking for a surefire way to stop retaliatory redistricting in their home state, they could also call on GOPers in other states to stand down. As the governor’s office has noted, the new congressional maps would only take effect “if other states engage in mid-cycle partisan gerrymanders.”

Oklahoma’s Education Department has approved plans to force teachers from California or New York to pass an ideology test to ensure that they aren’t too “woke” before they hire them.

The test was created by right-wing think-tank Prager University, which has made headlines recently for developing education material that minimizes American slavery. It features 50 questions about the government, gender, and religion. The Education Department posted five sample questions from the exam, including, “What are the first three words of the Constitution?” and a question about the biological differences between men and women. 

Teaching applicants from California and New York were notified that they will not be accepted without completing the test.  

“We’re not bringing in woke indoctrinators into the classroom,” said Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters. “It’s a very America-first approach.”

Walters hopes to release the exam “soon.” He has also blocked Board of Education members from viewing the exam before potential teachers receive it. 

Oklahoma Education Association president Cari Elledge told USA Today that she believes the move will only exacerbate Oklahoma’s public school teacher shortage. The state teachers union wrote in a letter that Walters “has no legal authority to vet certified teachers based on political ideology.” 

Walters has made headlines previously for trying to force Trump Bibles and prayer into classrooms, reportedly watching pornography during a school board meeting, and inviting ICE to perform raids on the children of his state while they were at school.  

In short, he appears to be a loyal MAGA soldier who happens to have an alarming amount of power over the teachers and students of Oklahoma, and this test only reaffirms that.