Gavin Newsom is Playing a ‘Trump’ Character He Doesn’t Understand
Newsom and his communications team see the form: Trump insults people and he’s rude, so he won the presidency, so being rude and insulting wins the presidency.
Occasional California Governor Gavin Newsom, who keeps turning up anywhere but California, has continued his highly calculated descent into vulgar and insulting behavior this week. The performance still has the awkwardness of the first week of acting school. It’s like watching a character play a character, many times removed from an identifiable real person. Whatever he’s doing, he’s definitely pretending.
If you’ve missed it, Newsom is back to doing subtext-heavy locker room kneepad jokes like the one he did in Davos, and he’s bragging to audiences that he’s stupid like them, “a 960 SAT guy.” He’s playing a towel-snapper, a mean jock, not above hard words or a fist fight. His relentlessly horrible director of communications got in on the act, responding to questions from a journalist like this:
Newsom is not yet swaggering into campaign events in a wifebeater, but give him another week. The character he’s currently playing is a rude, crass, and transgressive, and not above dropping hints about coming up from the streets. Of Marin County, but whatever. If you haven’t seen what his hard-talking communications guy looks like, by the way, go take a look.
It’s a baffling performance, but last year the Bay Area lawyer and journalist Laura Powell gave us the key to understand it: Newsom is cargo culting, like a South Pacific islander watching the disappearance of military logistics efforts after World War II. “In isolated societies,” Powell wrote, “so-called cargo cults emerged when indigenous groups constructed imitation airstrips and towers, believing this would cause Western goods to descend from the skies as they once had, without understanding the actual forces that made the planes appear.” He’s performing a set of appearances, thinking that the images are the substance.
Men are turning away from the Democratic Party, so Newsom turned up last year on the podcast of Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL. As Powell noted, “Newsom laced his speech with curse words – roughly one per minute – and called Ryan ‘man’ or ‘brother’ with cringe-inducing frequency.” He talked a lot about football and guns, bro. Powell summarized the performance as Newsom “trying on a new mask.”
This year’s mask is modeled on the Shawn Ryan masculinity mask, but it’s a different version. It’s more directly a Donald Trump mask, but not quite: It’s a mask of what Gavin Newsom thinks Donald Trump is.
If you ask an allegedly respectable, institutionally aligned progressive to explain Trump, they’ll tell you that he’s cruel, vulgar, insulting, grotesque, rude, and so on. He smirks, demeans, degrades, jabs at people. Here, go read one of Paul Krugman’s rants if you want to see evidence of that interpretation. Note that Trump isn’t merely vulgar, here, he’s actually “unspeakably vulgar.” He’s doing all of this, they explain, just because. He just likes being mean. Headline and subhed of a semi-famous anti-Trump essay in the Atlantic: “The Cruelty Is the Point: President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.” Trump is just vulgar and insulting all the time for no reason but the fact that he gets off on it.
And he won the presidency twice, they think next. You see where this is going?
The people who think this stuff have no ability at all to perceive the substance behind the appearance, and go read that Krugman rant if you doubt me. Trump insults journalists a lot, so … this must prove that … voters like when rude politicians insult journalists? So if Democrats insult journalists, voters will like Democrats. Cargo culting: the performance of the form, uncomprehending mimicry.
There are a dozen obvious holes in this voters-just-like-rudeness theory, starting with the fact that Trump is famously gracious to people he likes. He insults people when he finds their behavior insulting, and people who like Trump tend to agree with his assessment.
Second, people who like the way Trump speaks also loved, for example, Marco Rubio’s recent speech in Munich, and JD Vance’s speech in the same place a year earlier, and Vance’s performance in the vice presidential debate, and the way Scott Bessent mauls idiots on television. They like a wide variety of speaking styles, people from enormously different backgrounds speaking in different tones and varying personal vernaculars. They like the substance of the Trump message, not merely the style of the single messenger. One day they’ll figure out what that substance is, but let’s not rush them.
Newsom and his communications team have looked at the political landscape, and they’ve decided that shipping containers full of food and blankets showed up because airplane-shaped things parked on the island. Cargo-culting, they see the form: Trump insults people and he’s rude, so he won the presidency, so being rude and insulting wins the presidency. They have no idea what’s going on behind any of that, and it shows.
You see Martha Raddatz not hearing herself, asking a shockingly stupid question with an idiotic premise, and then you see JD Vance crushing her: “Martha, do you hear yourself?” The insult works because Martha actually didn’t hear herself. It came from listening, which Vance is good at. Newsom and his appalling halfwit communications team see Vance insulting someone, and then they mimic the act of being insulting. If you just pick an occasional journalist and say, “you suck, screw you,” then you’re being like Trump and voters will like you. Right? Details unimportant. I keep thinking of that scene where Bill and Ted leave San Dimas and meet Socrates. It’s some pretty deep philosophizing.
Watch Gavin Newsom speak. You’ll see it. He’s playing what he thinks the character who won the presidency is like. He’s doing an imitation, like a cargo cultist, and thinking that the imitation is the thing itself. It’s horrible, an unwatchable mess from an empty man, and he’s obviously very proud of himself for being clever. Let us hope that he is never able to learn better.
https://thefederalist.com/2026/02/24/gavin-newsom-is-playing-a-trump-character-he-doesnt-understand