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Taco Trump and Just Dance Vance: How Gavin Newsom is taking the fight to MAGA - Trumo-style

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The Times Of Indiapublisher-detail-arrow
18th August, 2025 17:00 IST

It began with a meme. Two photographs went viral on X: Gavin Newsom as a teenager, scarf draped across his shoulders, the very image of San Francisco privilege; and J.D. Vance, straight-backed in Marine fatigues, fresh out of high school and heading for Iraq.

The contrast was deliberate. Newsom: born into money and connections, nurtured by the Getty family, polished into politics before he hit forty. Vance: raised in a chaotic household in Ohio, stabilized only by the Marines, hardened in Iraq, propelled upward by Yale Law and a bestselling memoir. It was the quintessential split screen — privilege versus grit, elites versus scrappers.


But the meme was only the opening act.




The Trumpian Turn

For years, Newsom’s official press accounts were standard Democratic fare: policy announcements, carefully worded releases, ribbon-cutting photos. Then, this August, something changed.

His press office on X suddenly began sounding like Donald Trump at 3 a.m.:

  • ALL CAPS proclamations.
  • Mocking nicknames.
  • Boasts so overblown they bordered on parody.

Trump was rechristened “Taco Trump” — shorthand for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” J.D. Vance became “JD ‘Just Dance’ Vance.” And Newsom crowned himself “our nation’s favorite governor,” vowing to “SAVE AMERICA” from the “disastrous maps war” Trump had unleashed.

The parody was deliberate. Newsom wasn’t talking policy; he was trolling.


MAGA : From Mockers to the Mocked

MAGA has always thrived on ridicule. Trump’s nicknames — “Crooked Hillary,” “Sleepy Joe,” “Low-Energy Jeb” — weren’t just insults. They were branding. They turned opponents into caricatures and made Democrats look joyless, out of touch, and defensive.

Newsom’s innovation was to flip the script. Instead of rolling his eyes or fact-checking, he mocked them back. He parodied their style, borrowed their cadence, threw their tactics in their face.

And MAGA, for once, didn’t laugh.

The Guilfoyle Subplot


Adding spice to the feud is a subplot straight out of a political soap opera. Gavin Newsom’s ex-wife is Kimberly Guilfoyle — now a sequined staple of MAGA, US Ambassador to Greece and Donald Trump Jr.’s former partner. From 2001 to 2006, she was married to Newsom and even served as First Lady of San Francisco during his mayoralty. Their split was civil, blamed on geography, but history clearly enjoys irony. Today, she’s a leading voice of MAGA while her ex-husband needles MAGA’s king with memes.



Why It Works

On the surface, Newsom’s trolling looks juvenile. Why would a governor's press account waste time calling the Vice President “Just Dance Vance”? But Democrats spent the last decade underestimating ridicule as a weapon. Trump proved that attention is currency, and nicknames can define opponents more effectively than policy papers.

By mimicking Trump’s style, Newsom isn’t trying to out-debate him. He’s trying to deny him the monopoly on mockery.

The strategy is simple:

  • Mock back.
  • Dominate the oxygen.
  • It’s crude. It’s performative. But it works.

The MAGA Battlefield in 2025

This fight isn’t happening in a vacuum. MAGA today isn’t just Trump’s campaign machinery; it’s a permanent movement. It controls school boards, censors textbooks, drives immigration crackdowns, and fuels conspiracies across social media.

The Republican Party has been fully absorbed into this ecosystem. J.D. Vance may be Vice President, but figures like Ron DeSantis and Marjorie Taylor Greene still command cultural loyalty. The battlefield isn’t legislation; it’s narrative.



That’s why Newsom’s trolling matters. He’s meeting MAGA not with white papers, but with memes — the lingua franca of the culture war.

Carrot and Stick

Trolling is the stick. But Newsom also wields a carrot: direct engagement. His podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom, has featured right-wing guests like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon. Democrats were horrified. Why legitimise extremists? But Newsom’s message was clear: I’m not afraid of you, and I’ll argue with you in your own spaces. It’s a risky gamble. But it positions Newsom as one of the few Democrats willing to meet MAGA on the cultural battlefield rather than avoiding it.

Harris vs. Newsom: Memo vs. Meme

The contrast with Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign could not be sharper. Harris ran as the anti-Trump: sober, cautious, scripted. She leaned on biography — first woman Vice President, daughter of immigrants — and policy proposals on childcare and reproductive rights. But her campaign avoided spectacle.

When Trump mocked her as “Laffin’ Kamala,” Harris didn’t punch back; she relied on fact-checkers and surrogates. Her message discipline made her look serious, but it left her flat-footed in a culture war defined by ridicule.

Newsom, by contrast, leans into the chaos. Where Harris tried to be dignified and above the fray, Newsom revels in it. Where she treated memes as unserious, he treats them as currency. Harris thought voters would crave normalcy. Newsom bets they want someone who can fight Trump at his own game.

Harris’s 2024 was a memo. Newsom’s 2025 is a meme.

Democratic Doubts

Not everyone in the Democratic Party is impressed. Moderates see the trolling as reckless, undermining the gravitas of their brand. Progressives worry it trivialises policy battles like climate change and healthcare.

But among the Democratic base, there’s also relief. For years, they’ve watched Trump humiliate their leaders with nicknames, while Democrats responded with sighs. Newsom is the first to punch back in kind.

The Risk

The danger is obvious. If Democrats troll like Trump, do they risk becoming indistinguishable from him? Does parody politics normalise Trumpism rather than defeat it? This is the tightrope Newsom walks. But the louder they scoffed, the more they proved Newsom’s point. MAGA loves to brand others but hates being branded itself.

The Lyndon Johnson Question

Yet trolling alone isn’t governing. The deeper question is whether Newsom, if he ever reaches the White House, could turn parody into power. Here’s where Lyndon B. Johnson looms. When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Johnson was dismissed as a backroom Texan wheeler-dealer. But he stunned the nation by pushing through the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, and the Great Society.

Johnson showed that politics requires both theatre and muscle — spectacle to capture attention, and force to deliver results. Can Newsom do the same? Can the man who tweets “TACO TRUMP” also twist arms in Congress to pass universal childcare or climate reform?

Eyes on 2028
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Newsom insists he isn’t running in 2028. No one believes him. With Biden retired and Harris damaged, Democrats need a contender who won’t flinch in the meme arena. The question is whether Democrats will stomach a candidate who fights like Trump. For some, it’s unbecoming. For others, it’s overdue. For MAGA, Newsom is an irritation they can’t easily dismiss: rich, coastal, polished — but unafraid to mock them back.

Back to the Meme

That viral split screen of scarf vs fatigues was meant to define who had grit and who had privilege. But in modern politics, biography matters less than performance. Vance leveraged his Marine past to ride Trump’s coattails into the vice presidency. Newsom is leveraging parody to carve out space as the Democrat unafraid of MAGA. Act one was the split screen. Act two is the troll war. Act three, if it comes, will be 2028 — where Gavin Newsom will either be remembered as the liberal who cosplayed Trump for a season or the Democrat who figured out how to use memes to win power. Could he be the Lyndon Johnson of the meme era — underestimated, even mocked, until history forced him into greatness? That remains unanswered. But for now, MAGA finally knows what it feels like to be on the receiving end of ridicule. And Gavin Newsom is laughing loudest.

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