Gavin Newsom channels his best inner Trump with theatrical parody that RALLIES demoralized Democrats
Newsom announced on Tuesday that California would redraw its congressional districts after Trump ignored the governor's letter urging him to call off redistricting in red states.
'DONALD 'TACO' TRUMP, AS MANY CALL HIM, 'MISSED' THE DEADLINE!!! CALIFORNIA WILL NOW DRAW NEW, MORE 'BEAUTIFUL MAPS,' THEY WILL BE HISTORIC AS THEY WILL END THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY (DEMS TAKE BACK THE HOUSE!),' wrote Newsom's press office on X.
The post is meant to mimic the unique cadence and colorful language Trump uses to write his messages on Truth Social in blaring all-caps font.
'BIG PRESS CONFERENCE THIS WEEK WITH POWERFUL DEMS AND GAVIN NEWSOM — YOUR FAVORITE GOVERNOR — THAT WILL BE DEVASTATING FOR 'MAGA.' THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! — GN.'
Newsom wrote a letter to Trump on Monday demanding Trump order GOP-dominated states, including Texas, halt their efforts to redraw congressional districts.
The governor told Trump he's 'playing with fire' before promising 'California can neutralize any gains you hope to make.' Newsom's office gave Trump until Tuesday evening to respond to the letter.
The crude-Trumpian all-caps language of the tweet invoked celebration from Democrats who have been leaderless and searching for a fighter following their 2024 election drubbing.
'Love him or hate him, you've got to admit he's the fiercest fighter right now,' wrote X user @ML3democrats in a tweet that received over 57,000 likes. 'He terrifies Trump.'
'Gavin Newsom is so good at this,' Majid M. Padellan told his 1.3 million followers on X while attaching a screenshot of Newsom's tweet.
Popular Democratic activist Brian Krassenstein praised Newsom on X, stating, 'Holy CRAP. Gavin Newsom is good at this game!'
'HA: Gavin Newsom just announced, in a way MAGA will understand, that California is moving forward with redrawing their maps after Trump failed to meet the deadline to stand down,' Harry Sisson commented. 'Go for it, Newsom!'
Ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, Trump and Republican congressional leadership are urging several Republican-led states to redraw their districts to help create more opportunities for the GOP.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott responded earlier this week to Newsom's threats to neutralize any Republican gains.
The Texas leader vowed to remove up to 10 of the 12 Democratic seats in the Lone Star State.
Meanwhile, Democratic Texas lawmakers have fled to Illinois and New York to block a quorum over a vote for redistricting.
If California moves forward with mid-decade redistricting, Newsom has promised to eliminate up to five GOP-held seats.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
28 minutes ago
- The Independent
Retired Army General says Trump needs to convince Putin that Russia can't win in Ukraine
Ahead of Donald Trump 's summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday, retired U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark has said it is vital for the president to convince the Russian leader that he cannot win the war in Ukraine. Speaking on The Record with Greta Van Susteren on Newsmax on Wednesday, Clark, a former Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, warned that Putin would not respond to conventional diplomatic threats. 'We've made so many threats to Russia over the last six months about consequences, and they mostly get postponed,' Clark said. 'And so, I don't know – I hope the consequences will be a restart of U.S. military assistance from the Trump administration to Ukraine. Because really, when you get right down to it, I think the only way you're going to really halt President Putin's territorial ambitions is to convince him he cannot win.' He continued: 'Administration after administration has tried sanctions. Obama tried it. Biden tried it. It hasn't stopped anything and makes it more difficult. The Russians learn to live with it. 'And so putting sanctions on again – it sounds rough and tough. It avoids the threat of use of force, but ultimately it doesn't accomplish much.' As preparations for the Anchorage summit continue, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov has stated that the meeting at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson will be a one-on-one between Trump and Putin, with translators present, and that 'sensitive matters' will be discussed. In addition to the prospect of ending the war, which has raged since February 2022, enhanced economic cooperation and trade between the U.S. and Russia will also be on the table, Ushakov said. Both leaders will take part in a news conference once the summit is concluded, he added, as well as wider talks with their delegations and a working breakfast. On Wednesday, Trump attended a virtual meeting with European leaders, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, to discuss the goals of the summit and establish red lines that cannot be crossed. According to French President Emmanuel Macron, the American emphatically ruled out the prospect of Kyiv being invited to join NATO, a step that Moscow would have interpreted as a deliberate provocation. Trump himself warned afterwards that Russia would face 'very severe consequences' if Putin does not agree to a ceasefire but hinted that a follow-up meeting could be swiftly arranged if Friday's summit proves a success. Zelensky has since joined British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in London, with the latter reiterating: 'International borders must not be changed by force and Ukraine must have robust and credible security guarantees to defend its territorial integrity as part of any deal.' Putin said on Thursday that Washington was making 'sincere efforts' to resolve the conflict in Ukraine and suggested that a new deal on nuclear arms control between Moscow and Washington could be on the cards.
The Independent
28 minutes ago
- The Independent
Trump told cops to do ‘whatever the hell they want' to fix DC. Here's why that's ‘extremely dangerous'
As he deployed the National Guard and surged federal law enforcement agencies into the nation's capital, President Donald Trump gave local police in Washington, D.C. permission to retaliate against a population under federal occupation. Trump, seizing on images of a beaten former Department of Government Efficiency staffer to justify his takeover, announced a 'crime emergency' to put the Metropolitan Police Department under the administration's control. 'See, they fight back until you knock the hell out of them, because it's the only language they understand,' Trump said from the White House on August 11. 'You spit and we hit,' the president said. 'And they're standing there and people are spitting in their face and they're not allowed to do anything. But now they are allowed to do whatever the hell they want.' Civil rights groups and legal experts fear the president's remarks will embolden police officers to abandon constitutional guardrails — and signal to Americans that those protections are meaningless. 'It's very scary that the president felt the license to say this,' said Insha Rahman, vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice and the director of Vera Action. His remarks appear to endorse police 'running roughshod over constitutional rights and due process protections,' she told The Independent. That language is 'extremely dangerous' and shows a 'blatant disregard to the constitutional mandates that the president and every government entity is bound to,' according to Kristin Henning, Georgetown Law professor and director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative. No, police cannot do 'whatever the hell they want,' Rahman added. But officers 'will feel emboldened to do things that we know are not only legally unsound and questionable but also unpopular — like sweep away people and forcibly move people who are homeless, or tell people that they can't be in certain public places.' Civil rights groups fear the administration is using the city's police force for a political power grab, while putting American troops on the ground as an occupying force that's not trained to perform basic law enforcement tasks like responding to 911 calls. Instead, D.C. has become 'political theater' using 'blatantly phony justification for abuse of emergency powers,' according to Monica Hopkins, executive director of the ACLU of the District of Columbia. Trump is 'using the word 'emergency' as a blank check for asserting federal control whenever it suits his agenda – abusing emergency powers while militarizing our communities and endangering the very people he is sworn to protect,' according to Mike Zamore, national director of policy and government affairs at the ACLU. The Independent has requested comment from the Metropolitan Police Department. Trump has a vivid history of dogwhistle calls to action. Proud Boys were inspired by Trump's call to 'stand back and stand by.' His call for a 'big protest' that 'will be wild' fueled a mob of his own supporters on January 6, 2021, when he encouraged a crowd to 'fight like hell' before they stormed the Capitol. He also routinely threatens heavy-handed tactics in other Democratic-majority cities. At his White House press conference this week, he singled out Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Oakland — all of which have Black mayors and large minority populations that have overwhelmingly voted against him. In his remarks, Trump suggested teenagers were 'randomly attacking' citizens and called for trying children as young as 14 as adults to 'lock them up for a long time.' Jeanine Pirro — the former Fox News personality recently confirmed as U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. — raged against 'young punks' and demanded laws be changed to send teenagers to adult prisons. Those threats are 'counterproductive and ineffective,' according to Henning, author of The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth, which draws on her experience representing young Black people in Washington's juvenile courts. 'They don't use these words, but they are definitely blaming all Black kids in the city for these problems,' Henning said. '[Residents] are living with a state of fear that has been concocted, and that's all a part of a larger strategy. … It's not even that deeply veiled, because it's been done over and over again.' The Independent has requested comment from the White House. Black and Latino youth are facing 'extraordinary psychological trauma in contact with police,' with reported high rates of fear, anxiety, depression and hopelessness, according to Henning. 'When they go out on the streets and they encounter police, they see these federal agents, the anxiety is real, and the reaction is an adolescent response,' she said. 'They might assert their First Amendment right to say, 'I don't want your presence.' All of the things that teenagers do … They can go from zero to 100 in an instant.' Thousands of people flooded streets across the country throughout the summer of 2020 for daily demonstrations against police brutality and racism, including in the streets of Washington, D.C. 'Can't you just shoot them?' Trump said at the time, according to his former Defense Secretary Mark Esper. 'Just shoot them in the legs or something?' Trump also demanded law enforcement officers 'crack skulls' and 'beat the f*** out' of protesters, according to the book Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost by The Wall Street Journal' s Michael Bender. In his second administration, Trump is no longer moored by a handful of advisers who could curb his impulses. He was surrounded by the nation's top law enforcement officials as he announced 'liberation day' for D.C. this week. Trump invoked Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, which grants the federal government authority to run the locally controlled police department. He needs congressional authority to extend that control beyond 30 days. On August 13, Trump said he wants 'long-term extensions' of his federal occupation. 'I don't want to call a national emergency. If I have to, I will,' he said. Trump also called for Congress to pass a 'crime bill' that's 'going to initially pertain to D.C.' but serve as a 'very positive example' for other cities. Despite the administration's claims that crime is 'out of control' in D.C., the data shows the opposite: 2024 saw the lowest violent crime rates in the capital in more than 30 years, while reports of violent crime within the first seven months of 2025 have plunged 26 percent from last year. Those rates mirror national downward trends, according to FBI crime data released during Trump's administration. 'Trump has a long history of weaponizing fear about crime,' according to Rahman, highlighting the president's campaign rhetoric of American cities under siege and an 'invasion' at the U.S.-Mexico border. 'People are supportive of police, but they want police to focus on responding to the most serious cases, being responsive, and investigating and solving serious crime,' she said. 'What they do not want — that we have had a long history of seeing in this country — is police overreach.' Henning fears that the city's Metropolitan Police Department is under 'undue pressure' to boost arrests and 'put numbers on the board,' she told The Independent. 'That pressure is going to be there, whether they admit it or not,' she said.
Telegraph
29 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Here is Eighties New York, in all its brash, seedy glory
In Jonathan Mahler's vivid and compelling history of New York in the 1980s – The Gods of New York – one incident in particular stands out for its combination of hubris, corruption and grand Guignol horror. It concerns the investigation into Donald Manes, the president of the city's borough of Queens, for his part in a multi-million dollar kickback scheme – an investigation conducted by Rudy Giuliani, then the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. To get to Manes, Giuliani cut a deal with an underling, Geoffrey Lindenauer – a man whose colourful past included running an unlicensed psychotherapy institute with his mother, where he occasionally prescribed sexual relations with himself as the most efficacious form of treatment, and who had subsequently risen to the august position of deputy director of the parking violations bureau. Faced with 39 counts of extortion, racketeering and mail fraud, 'Lindy', as the tabloid press took to calling him, spilled the beans on his boss. Confronted with a newspaper headline – 'Manes Accused of Extortion' – the borough president took his own life while on the phone to his psychiatrist, cradling the phone between his neck and shoulder, pulling an 8-inch knife out of a kitchen drawer and plunging it into his chest. Jonathan Mahler coins a useful euphemism, 'crisis opportunists', for the cast of this book: a catalogue of crooks, chancers and grifters, firebrand activists, rap stars, politicians scrambling up the greasy pole and falling back down again, people on the make – and Donald Trump. As Mahler puts it, in the 70s, New York, the place 'where you went to make it,' had become 'a place where you got the hell out of if you could'. The city was on its knees, and Washington had refused to help. As the famous Daily News headline put it, '[President] Ford to City: Drop Dead.' But by the 80s, the wheel had turned. Financial deregulation had promoted a soaring stock market, and a corporate takeover craze. As Wall Street boomed, what Mahler calls a 'guilt-free consumerism' blossomed, and skyscrapers grew like mushrooms. The personification of the city was Ed Koch, who governed as mayor between 1978 and 1989. Small and pugnacious, the son of furrier who had arrived at Ellis Island in 1909, Koch was a Second World War veteran who had risen through local politics by a combination of guile, wit and iron-clad self-belief, who boasted, 'I am not the type to get ulcers; I give them.' Cardinal John O'Connor, the Archbishop of New York described Koch as the 'only man I know who speaks to God as an associate'. He needed all the help he could get. Over the course of his 12 years as mayor, Koch would be assailed by a daunting multitude of problems arising from the growing gulf between the ultra-rich and the poor. These included homelessness, a soaring crime rate, a series of gruesome murders, local government corruption, racial strife, a growing crack epidemic and the rising tally of deaths – greater than any other city in America – from the Aids epidemic. The demands from activists for increased funding to deal with the crisis proved particularly problematic for Koch, a closeted homosexual who lived in constant fear of being outed. Mahler's book offers vivid portraits of the characters woven into the chaotic tapestry of the city. There was the legendary tabloid journalist Jimmy Breslin, a 'gruff fire-hydrant of a man', who embodied the tabloid form 'to rumpled shambolic perfection', chronicling the venality of New York's rich and powerful and the desperation and dignity of its poor and powerless, and who described the essence of his job as 'climbing the tenement stairs'. Spike Lee was a struggling film director until his 1989 film, Do The Right Thing, provided a vivid portrait for an international audience of the simmering tension between black and white residents in Brooklyn. (The scene where a policeman chokes the character Radio Raheem to death with his night-stick, sparking a riot, was to prove eerily prophetic of George Floyd's death in 2020.) Then there was the man who came to define the image of New York as a limitless cash-register for those brash and audacious enough to seize the opportunity. Trump's rise to become the most powerful property developer in New York – his unabashed glorification of wealth and shameless self-promotion overshadowed any question marks over his creative accounting practices – had made him catnip for the media. In 1976, the New York Times was lionising him as 'tall, lean and blond, with dazzling white teeth, and he looks ever so much like Robert Redford'. Trump Tower, built in 1983, became the city's tallest residential building. Twenty storeys higher than its original zoning allowed, after Trump had acquired unexploited 'air rights' from the neighbouring Tiffany store, the Tower was a shimmering symbol of New York's economic revival, and a testament to Trump's soaring hubris. To lure buyers, he numbered the floors to make them seem higher than they actually were. The first residential floor, which was 20 storeys above street level, was labelled the 30th floor. Among the eager buyers were a high-ranking member of a Russian crime family, a notorious cocaine dealer and the mob-connected head of a numbers racket. Unfazed by his failed attempts as a casino operator to make Atlantic City a rival to Reno, Trump had fixed his eye on bigger things. While announcing he would not be running for President in 1988, he made no secret of his political ambitions, proposing that America should invade Iran, 'a horrible, horrible country', in order to capture its oil fields. 'It is easy to dismiss Mr Trump's political showboating for the barstool demagoguery it is,' the St Louis Post-Dispatch editorialised, adding, prophetically as it turned out, that 'given [his] money and self-assurance, the odds are that he has not made his last political appearance.' The Rev Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist, was someone whose facility for self-promotion almost rivalled Trump's. Caricatured in Tom Wolfe's satire on Eighties New York, The Bonfire of the Vanities, as the Rev Reggie Bacon, Sharpton was an erstwhile boy preacher and bagman for the soul singer James Brown who, amidst the rising racial tensions in New York, became a confrontational and incendiary presence at the front line of any conflict in a city. His portly figure, pompadour hairstyle and predilection for colourful tracksuits, often worn with a gold medallion bearing the image of Martin Luther King, served as a beacon for reporters and tv crews. In 1987, Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old black girl who had been missing from her home for four days, was found seemingly unconscious, lying in a garbage bag, her clothing torn, her body smeared in faeces, with the initials KKK scrawled on her body in charcoal. She alleged that she had been kidnapped and sexually abused by a group of white men. Sharpton stepped forward, orchestrating the media coverage, describing Brawley as 'the symbol of the cause' and, as the investigation ground on, inflaming the situation even more by suggesting that the Ku Klux Klan and the Mafia were conspiring with the authorities in a cover-up. After 10 months, a Grand Jury ruled there was no evidence of Brawley being being abducted and abused, and had made up the story of abduction and rape to avoid facing her mother's violent boyfriend. Sharpton simply shrugged his shoulders, brushed the verdict aside as a miscarriage of justice, and moved on to his next agitation. Between crime, corruption, Aids and racial conflict, a beleaguered Koch was fighting on all fronts. But few of the many thorns in his side were more painful than a homeless woman named Joyce Brown, who had taken up residence on the pavement outside an ice-cream parlour in Midtown Manhattan, shouting obscenities at passers-by and responding to the kindness of strangers who gave her dollar bills by urinating on the money. In 1987, Brown became the first person to be incarcerated in Bellevue hospital, under an emergency programme introduced by a desperate Koch to forcibly commit the mentally disturbed homeless to psychiatric hospitals. Her incarceration became a cause célèbre, with thousands of homeless people marching through Midtown, chanting her name and demanding more affordable housing. Released from hospital, she appeared on TV shows, addressed a packed audience at Harvard Law School and taunted Koch in interviews, accusing him of having a 'personality disorder', while her lawyers fielded calls from publishers and movie agents. On a visit to Moscow, President Reagan cited Brown's successful campaign to be released and return to her spot on the pavement as a symbol of America as a free country. 'How far can we go in impinging on the freedom of someone who says this is the way I want to live.' Brown was unimpressed. 'Rather than talking about me', she was quoted as saying, 'why doesn't the President assist me in getting permanent housing?' Being painted as the heartless persecutor of a mentally disturbed homeless person was another dent in Koch's fading reputation. Despite having promised to 'keep my big mouth shut' if he won re-election, in 1989 he lost to David Dinkins, who became the city's first black mayor. That's where Mahler's book ends. But the story continues. Dinkins was to prove a one-term mayor. And waiting in the wings was Rudy Giuliani. A workaholic who subsisted on a diet of cheeseburgers by day and martinis by night, with a complexion so pallid a judge had once urged him to 'sit at Coney Island and get some colour', as US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Giuliani had achieved the apparently impossible. His tenacious pursuit and successful prosecution of the bosses of New York's most powerful Mafia families led Time magazine to describe him as resembling 'a quattrocento fresco of an obscure saint'. Meanwhile in 1986, he aided in the prosecution and imprisonment, on charges of insider trading, of the crooked arbitrageur Ivan Boesky, who had been involved in almost every major takeover of the previous five years, as well as the successful prosecution of the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert, which served as a welcome corrective to what Mahler describes as the 'greed-soaked, rule-bending era' on Wall Street. Giuliani had always nursed political ambitions and having run unsuccessfully as a Republican candidate in the 1989 mayoral elections, four years later he succeeded Dinkins as New York's mayor. In 2001, he went one step better, being lauded as 'America's mayor' for his leadership after 9/11. Then came the fall. The man who had made his name rooting out corruption ended up paying fealty to Donald Trump, representing him in the multitude of lawsuits Trump filed following the 2020 election, claiming the election had been rigged from an improvised podium in front of a porn store, hair dye leaking into his eyes. In 2023, Giuliani lost a $148-million defamation lawsuit after accusing two election workers in Georgia of lying to help steal the 2020 presidential contest from Donald Trump. In court, Giuliani pleaded poverty, telling a judge he had no car, credit card or cash. Mahler's account of corruption, riots and fortunes and reputations made and lost will stand as the definitive account of New York in the 80s, and proof that the feet of the gods, or those who believe they are, are indeed made of clay – but that still doesn't stop one of them becoming the most powerful man in the world.
