Trump Hits Back at Newsom After Viral Trolling Campaign Goes Unanswered for Days

President Trump is breaking his days-long silence on California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and his constant drumbeat of social media posts taking potshots at the president over his push for Republican states to redraw their congressional maps. In a post on Truth Social Wednesday night, Mr. Trump wrote, “Gavin Newscum is way down in the polls. He is viewed as the man who is destroying the once Great State of California. I will save California!!! President DJT.”Mr. Newsom shared a screenshot of the post on X and wrote, “Triggered?”The X account for the governor’s press team also shared the post and responded with snowflake emojis.Mr. Trump had been unusually silent as Mr. Newsom and his team embarked on a social media campaign that appeared intended to get a rise out of the president and prompt him to call off state Republican lawmakers’ mid-year redistricting efforts. When Mr. Trump did not respond, the governor held a rally to launch his effort to pass new congressional maps in California to counteract Texas’s new maps.In the days in between, and since, Mr. Newsom’s press team has been busy on social media, copying Mr. Trump’s distinct style of social media posts: writing in all caps, using a lot of exclamation points, parentheses, and random quotation marks, using nicknames, and stealing the president’s viral “thank you for your attention to this matter” sign-off.Mr. Newsom’s team dubbed him America’s “most loved and handsome governor.” His staff even copied the president’s tendency to share digitally altered images, such as a fake Time magazine cover showing Mr. Newsom wearing a crown and with the headline, “Long live the king,” and an AI-generated image of Kid Rock with the caption, “Kid Rock wants you to support Gavin Newsom.”After the deadline passed for Mr. Trump to call off the redistricting push, Mr. Newsom’s team wrote on X, “WHEN SPEAKER ‘LITTLE MAN’ JOHNSON IS STANDING IN ‘THE UNEMPLOYMENT LINE,’ HE CAN THANK DONALD ‘TACO’ J. TRUMP. TRUMP MISSED A SIMPLE DEADLINE — SOMETHING HE HAS OFTEN DONE WITH HIS MANY FAILED BUSINESSES — NOW CALIFORNIA WILL ‘FIRE’ HIM WITH NEW, ‘MORE BEAUTIFUL MAPS.’ HIGHLY ANTICIPATED, HISTORIC’ PRESS CONFERENCE WITH YOUR FAVORITE GOVERNOR GAVIN CHRISTOPHER NEWSOM!!!! THANK YOU FOR YOU ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER. — GCN.”As the trolling increases so does support for redistricting in California. According to Mr. Newsom’s pollster, David Binder, 57 percent of California voters and 84 percent of Democrats support map changes. At the same time, 64 percent of voters and 72 percent of Democrats told Politico-Citrin Center pollsters that they want to retain the independent commission responsible for drawing the state’s districts, not throw that authority back to the legislature.While the trolling campaign went viral and won praise from Democrats, it seemed for days to fail to get a response from its primary target audience: Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump mostly focused his attention on his other adversaries, such as a former FBI director, James Comey, and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, until Wednesday.Mr. Newsom told a local TV station, Fox 11 at Los Angeles, that he decided to start trolling Mr. Trump because of all the “misrepresentations, all the untruths” uttered by the president.“And it was a big wake-up call, and we got back on our feet, and we got back on the offense,” Mr. Newsom said. “So yes, I’ve changed. The facts have changed. We need to change. And we need to stand up to this authoritarian. We need to stand up at this moment.”

Trump Hits Back at Newsom After Viral Trolling Campaign Goes Unanswered for Days

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