September 3, 2025
As Democrats sharpen their on-line sport, Gavin Newsom’s Trump-style jabs reveal each the dangers and rewards of preventing hearth with hearth in an consideration financial system constructed for bluster.
Gavin Newsom’s latest mockery of Donald Trump proves that imitation isn’t at all times the sincerest type of flattery. Amid the continuing battle over congressional redistricting, Newsom’s pitch-perfect posts about Trump’s “TINY HANDS” and California’s “PERFECT MAPS” have been wildly entertaining, and, a minimum of by one measure, wildly profitable—the posts have garnered thousands and thousands of views and counting.
Whereas it’s refreshing to see a distinguished Democrat unapologetically standing as much as the present administration, Newsom’s jabs additionally reinforce the endurance of Trump’s blustery and incoherent style. And so they reveal the diploma to which the eye financial system has disrupted our focus and degraded our language.
Trump continues to learn from the regular decline within the American consideration span pushed by social media. His fashion of quick, punchy, inflammatory language—and his technique of flooding the zone with a brand new federal freak present day after day—is engineered to achieve this chaotic setting. However some latest on-line victories appear to point that progressives can even win on this battlefield in the event that they deploy the fitting mixture of profane fashion and coverage substance.
It’s doable the Trump period would by no means have been inaugurated with out the concurrent smartphone period’s reshaping consideration spans and media habits. One survey has discovered that Individuals check their phones an astonishing 144 instances each day, and about 40 p.c of adults report being “almost constantly online.” Because of this, Individuals are studying much less. In 2024, lower than half of adults mentioned that they had picked up a book previously yr, persevering with a constant downward development.
The MSNBC journalist Chris Hayes has analyzed this regression in his e-book The Sirens’ Name: How Consideration Grew to become the World’s Most Endangered Useful resource (a narrative that thousands and thousands of Individuals may gain advantage from understanding, if solely they have been nonetheless studying). He argues that the relentless competitors for consideration erodes considerate discourse whereas incentivizing probably the most inconsiderate voices. It has contributed to mental health crises, the decline of journalism, and political polarization. It additionally fueled the rise of Donald Trump, who way back proved himself to be a malignant savant of consideration manipulation.
Trump’s understanding of the brand new media ecosystem propelled all three of his presidential campaigns. In 2016, he obtained an estimated $5.6 billion price of free media. By that September, the phrase Americans associated the most with Hillary Clinton was “e-mail,” whereas they related Trump with “speech,” “president” and “immigration.”
Present Difficulty
Quick-forward to 2024, and he stored courting on-line consideration with stunts resembling working a choreographed 30-minute “shift” at McDonald’s. He dominated information media with lying that demanded journalistic protection, resembling his promotion of the xenophobic falsehood that Haitian migrants have been eating Ohio pets. As Hayes wrote, Trump’s strategy to politics during the last decade has been the “equal of operating bare by way of the neighborhood: repellent however transfixing.”
Now Trump isn’t just benefiting from however deliberately accelerating these reversals. He has defunded and harassed main analysis universities, censored historical exhibits at museums, and created Reality Social—an imitation of Twitter that has emerged as a playground for conspiracy theorists.
He’s making an attempt the governmental equal of a lobotomy.
These setbacks have led progressives to more and more perceive that electoral victory requires digital dominance. And squaring up with Trump on social media seems a prerequisite for rallying the general public round any political imaginative and prescient. As one strategist put it whereas praising Newsom’s Trump impersonation: “Democrats are over being the ‘good man’ social gathering.”
Already, there’s some pleasant needling of the fitting simply discovered within the proverbial social media haystack. The streamer Hasan Piker has been described as a “gateway drug” for progressive politics, whereas his participating model of express quips led GQ to name him “the most well liked left-wing political commentator on-line.” When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez streamed herself enjoying the sport Amongst Us with Piker earlier than the 2020 election, she virtually broke a livestreaming document on the Twitch platform, drawing about 440,000 concurrent viewers.
Elected Democrats are additionally taking off their digital gloves. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker responded to Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico by threatening to rechristen Lake Michigan “Lake Illinois.” In an instance of sport respecting sport, Zohran Mamdani’s technique of talking on to voters by way of social media received unlikely praise from Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene is much less a fan of Texas Consultant Jasmine Crockett, who went viral for describing Greene as having a “bleach-blonde bad-built butch physique.” And in Maine, the oysterman and Democratic US Senate candidate Graham Platner is drawing headlines for a pugnacious campaign launch video during which he declares: “The distinction between Susan Collins and Ted Cruz is a minimum of Ted Cruz is sincere about promoting us out and never giving a rattling.”
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Nonetheless, speaking the speak additionally requires strolling the stroll by implementing daring, authentically progressive initiatives. One in every of Newsom’s Trump-mocking posts introduced an aggressive redistricting plan to counter Republican gerrymandering in Texas. Bernie Sanders has endorsed that move, simply as he endorsed Mamdani, whose affordability agenda represents one other formidable stance to match pugilistic rhetoric.
In any other case, adhering to the philosophy of “once they go low, we go excessive” dangers failing to fulfill voters the place they’re. It appears Individuals search a fighter on their behalf and at their facet.
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