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.
NASHVILLE LOVES GAVIN NEWSOM!
— Izzy Gardon (@iGardon) February 22, 2026
SOLD OUT CROWD FOR BOOK TOUR STOP #1. pic.twitter.com/jJ15ccUYTj
Hey @LindseyGrahamSC let me know if you want me to drop off more kneepads while I’m in town! pic.twitter.com/Sz3udi0scS
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) February 24, 2026
🚨🚨EXCLUSIVE and BREAKING: What about that @GavinNewsom dyslexia disgnosis - can the gov. provide any paperwork related to his dyslexia diagnosis at any time of his life?
— Susan Crabtree (@susancrabtree) February 23, 2026
Newsom’s comms team just now tells me to “fuck off.”
Think @GavinNewsom’s comms team is losing it today? pic.twitter.com/oT3GoK5Cxi
The little man who just told reporter @susancrabtree to “F off” is taxpayer funded Izzy Gardon @iGardon, Gavin Newsom’s Director of Communications.
— Amy Reichert (@amyforsandiego) February 23, 2026
The people that lecture everyone about “civility” & “protecting democracy” can’t handle a question from a female reporter. https://t.co/LvuGcTjpLd pic.twitter.com/B6nrqWkTKR
It’s a baffling performance, but last year the Los Angeles 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.
Angel mom Laura Wilkerson delivered a powerful account of the moment she first spoke with President Trump about her son Josh’s murder.
— Overton (@overton_news) February 23, 2026
Wilkerson said Trump looked her in the eye and promised he would never forget her son...and he didn’t.
WILKERSON: “I met a man about 11 years… pic.twitter.com/OH0Q9p5wrZ
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 them 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.
