{"id":161655,"date":"2025-08-23T01:58:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-23T01:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/maga-world-is-so-close-to-getting-it-the-atlantic\/"},"modified":"2025-08-23T01:58:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-23T01:58:09","slug":"maga-world-is-so-close-to-getting-it-the-atlantic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/maga-world-is-so-close-to-getting-it-the-atlantic\/","title":{"rendered":"MAGA World Is So Close to Getting It – The Atlantic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gavin Newsom\u2019s parodies are riling people up\u2014and they don\u2019t quite seem to understand why.
Listen to more stories on the Noa<\/a> app.
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. <\/i>Sign up for it here.<\/i><\/a><\/small>
The Fox News commentator Dana Perino has finally had enough. \u201cYou have to stop it with the Twitter thing,\u201d she told the chief executive. \u201cI don\u2019t know where his wife is,\u201d she fumed. \u201cIf I were his wife, I would say, \u2018You are making a fool of yourself! Stop it!\u2019\u201d She went on to note that he has a big job, and that he has to be \u201ca little more serious.\u201d<\/p>\n

What a relief to see someone from Fox, the flagship MAGA network, getting completely fed up with juvenile social-media behavior from a national politician. Except the chief executive in this case was not Donald Trump, the president of the United States, but Gavin Newsom, the governor of California.
Newsom has taken to trolling Trump on social media by imitating his bizarre rants, odd capitalizations, and affection for exclamation points. He has also posted several memes that are on-the-nose parodies of things Trump has fed to his followers for years. Politico<\/i> recently summarized some of Newsom\u2019s activities<\/a> on social media:
There\u2019s Newsom on Mount Rushmore. There\u2019s Newsom getting prayed over by Tucker Carlson, Kid Rock and an angelic, winged Hulk Hogan. There\u2019s Newsom posting in all caps, saying his mid-cycle redistricting proposal has led \u201cMANY\u201d people to call him \u201cGAVIN CHRISTOPHER \u2018COLUMBUS\u2019 NEWSOM (BECAUSE OF THE MAPS!). THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.\u201d
Read: Thank you for your attention to this matter!<\/a>
Newsom got even closer to Trumpian perfection with a post<\/a> yesterday that is almost impossible to tell apart from an actual outburst from the president:
WHAT IS WRONG WITH CRACKER BARREL?? KEEP YOUR BEAUTIFUL LOGO!!! THE NEW ONE LOOKS LIKE CHEAP VELVEETA \u201cCHEESE\u201d FROM WALMART, THE PLACE FOR \u201cGROCERIES\u201d (AN OLD FASHIONED TERM)!!!
Some of these jibes are clumsy, but many are well crafted and even funny, despite the unsettling fact that the person whom the governor is parodying is the commander in chief. And the proof that Newsom is onto something is that his supporters are reacting with genuine rage. Perhaps Newsom has hit a nerve because satire is always more effective than name-calling. Mango Mussolini<\/i> or Cheeto Jesus <\/i>(both of which refer to the president\u2019s unusual bronzed skin tone) appeal only to Trump\u2019s opponents. But a post that perfectly mimics Trump\u2019s antics is a mirror\u2014one that prompts people to consider how Trump looks to everyone else in the world.
At the least, Newsom has scored a direct hit on the double standard<\/a> both in the national press and among the public that excuses Trump\u2019s deeply concerning behavior as merely part of Trump\u2019s shtick, some facet of his personality that cannot be held to account. Too many reporters have resorted to sane-washing<\/a> Trump, forcing his bizarre statements somehow to make sense by cherry-picking the occasional phrase or sentence related to policy while ignoring his kooky rants about sharks and his Stalinist threats against his political enemies. Newsom\u2019s parodies sidestep all the hand-wringing criticism about how presidents should act: Instead they show, rather than explain, what it should feel like when anyone but Trump acts the way Trump acts.
Perino is just one of many who is in high dudgeon. And Newsom responded to Perino with a dead-on Trump-like response<\/a>: \u201cDANA \u2018DING DONG\u2019 PERINO (NEVER HEARD OF HER UNTIL TODAY!)\u201d Vice President J. D. Vance has lashed out at Newsom, telling Fox that the Californian\u2019s attacks aren\u2019t landing, because his trolling \u201cignores the fundamental genius of President Trump\u2019s political success, which is that he\u2019s authentic\u201d; in other words, everyone knows that Newsom\u2019s crackpot hijinks are fake but Trump\u2019s are real\u2014a rather odd defense.
And of course, the MAGA posters on social media and Facebook have flown off the handle with rage. (Newsom is having a \u201cmental breakdown,\u201d said one MAGA influencer, without a trace of irony.) As it turns out, the people who pioneered the slogan<\/a> \u201cFuck your feelings\u201d are impossibly delicate souls.
Others have adopted a pose of criticizing Newsom more in sorrow than anger. \u201cI\u2019m all for appreciating crass humor,\u201d said Harmeet Dhillon<\/a>, a lawyer and MAGA social-media stalwart who is now assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Trump Justice Department. \u201cI love South Park<\/i>. It\u2019s hilarious.\u201d (One wonders if she\u2019s been watching the show<\/a> recently.) \u201cBut don\u2019t just be a loser copying the most powerful person in the world\u2019s style.\u201d Trump\u2019s majordomo at Fox, Sean Hannity<\/a>, summed up this New Seriousness among the president\u2019s supporters when he tut-tutted Newsom\u2019s \u201cperformative confrontational style,\u201d adding that \u201cmaybe it wins you points with the loony radical base in your party,\u201d but it won\u2019t win elections. How refreshing: Fox commentators and leading figures in the Trump administration all agreeing that a politician should not conduct himself in public like a dim, insufferable child.
They\u2019re all so <\/i>close to getting it.
I admit that I am conflicted about Newsom\u2019s approach. Some years ago, I wrote that Trump\u2019s opponents, especially the ones addicted to terms<\/a> such as Drumpf<\/i>, the Orange Menace<\/i>, Cadet Bone Spurs<\/i>, and others needed to act like adults, and convey the gravity of their concerns about Trump instead of treating him like either an inconsequential boob or a towering werewolf whose name must not be invoked. The same goes for the too-online liberals who refer to \u201cRethuglicans\u201d and \u201cRepubliKKKans\u201d\u2014uncomfortably similar to the media-addicted right-wingers who use infantile slams such as DemonRats <\/i>and Killary<\/i>.
Read: The week that changed everything for Gavin Newsom<\/a>
One aspect of Newsom\u2019s parodies have genuinely made me laugh: his posting of pictures done in the style of the artist and Trump admirer Jon McNaughton, who is a competent illustrator but whose paintings are strange<\/a>. They\u2019re a kind of hallucinatory mash-up of Grant Wood and medieval iconography, in which Trump carries the world like Atlas, or is blessed by dead presidents, or rescues the Constitution from glowering liberals. (The Newsom image<\/a> with the deceased Hulk Hogan was so perfectly rendered that at first I thought it was created by McNaughton himself.) Trump supporters seem to love these pictures. Newsom has shown just how weird they are.
Newsom has made his point and should move on. But his lasting accomplishment has been to reveal that Trump\u2019s supporters are not as impervious to reality as the president\u2019s opponents might believe. I suspect\u2014as I have since the day Trump announced his first run for president a decade ago\u2014that the MAGA faithful are hypersensitive to criticisms of Trump because, in their hearts, many of them know<\/i>. <\/i>They know that many of Trump\u2019s statements are offensive and alarmingly detached from reality. They know that Trump has a disordered personality<\/a>. They know that the president is a daily embarrassment to his party and to his nation.
For years, these MAGA partisans have employed various tactics to prevent the imminent pain of cognitive dissonance. They resort to \u201cwhat about\u201d arguments aimed at other politicians; they claim that Trump actually knows what he\u2019s doing or that they understand the message underneath all the broken thoughts, garbled words, and dead-end sentences. Now Newsom is forcing them to see what Trump looks like without the distorting force field created by Trump\u2019s showmanship and his aggressive delivery of incoherent statements.
Come to think of it, maybe MAGA world isn\u2019t close <\/i>to getting it; maybe they do<\/i> get it, and maybe that\u2019s why, this time, they\u2019re especially angry.<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gavin Newsom\u2019s parodies are riling people up\u2014and they don\u2019t quite seem to understand why.Listen to more stories on the Noa app.This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.The Fox News commentator Dana Perino has finally had enough. \u201cYou have to stop it with the Twitter thing,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":161656,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-161655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161655\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}