NEWSLETTER: Gavin Newsom's noncompliance

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Dwelling on the dangers of Donald Trump is a bit like thinking about your own mortality: always present, always unsettling, and too unnerving to contemplate for long.

It’s made worse by the fact that Trump is winning. Paramilitary troops are patrolling city streets, and immigrants are being disappeared into gulags. Many Democratic leaders have responded to this tyranny by sitting on their hands; a learned helplessness that inspires hopelessness in voters.

That’s what makes Gavin Newsom’s social media posts mocking Trump so cathartic. It doesn’t stop MAGA’s reign of terror, but it does point a giant middle finger in their direction.

Posts like this would’ve been unimaginable a year ago. I know because in 2021, I was hired by a D.C. firm to run social media accounts for Democratic candidates. I was fresh off doing rapid response for Tom Steyer’s presidential campaign and was eager to play a role in shaping the party’s voice in the midterms.

I felt Republicans were at their most shameless—peaking with their vile claim that Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson was sympathetic toward child pornographers—and that defeating them required shedding the “when they go low, we go high” ethos in favor of something more pugilistic.

The candidates I worked for disagreed. They rejected the punchy tweets I wrote for being “too negative.” One Senate hopeful chewed me out for writing that his opponent had the “conviction of a weathervane,” insisting it “lacked class.”

I acquiesced to their demands and wrote the banal, toothless tweets they wanted. The day after Election Day, when most of these candidates lost, I was fired. 

Newsom’s X account isn’t going to save our republic. But the viral response to it may shake awake Democrats who insist on using the same tired playbook, even in the face of fascism. Democrats don’t control a single branch of government, but we can control how we communicate.

Elie Mystal recently wrote in The Nation about how small acts of noncompliance can bring about big change.

“I know these kinds of individualized, person-to-person acts of political and social resistance work… because it’s what the bad guys do,” Mystal said. “They don’t let their individual feelings of powerlessness stop them from using what power they have maximally. They don’t despair—they get angry.”

In my view, this is what Newsom is doing.

There’s not a lot to be hopeful about right now, but if we’re lucky, I think it’s possible that the most interesting story of our era is not Trump, but how the Democratic Party rebuilt itself in his wake.

ICYMI

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that a provision of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was a “backdoor for privatizing Social Security.”

Making changes to Social Security has long been considered the third rail of American politics, given the program’s immense popularity and its role in keeping 16.3 million Americans aged 65 and older out of poverty.

American Journal News reached out to 31 of the 35 House Republicans considered the most vulnerable incumbents in 2026 to see if they agreed with Bessent. We received no responses.

Read more: Vulnerable House GOP silent on Bessent’s Social Security privatization claim

WATCH AN AD

Maine’s Susan Collins is the only Republican Senator from a state Trump lost in 2024. Any hope Dems have of retaking the Senate next year will likely hinge on her defeat.

Oysterman and combat veteran Graham Platner is one of a handful of Democrats challenging her. His launch video takes aim at billionaires, endorses universal health care, and calls for an end to the war in Gaza.

Interestingly, Platner has the same comms consultant as Zohran Mamdani and Dan Osborn. Check it out!

2028 WATCH… Ruben Gallego met with donors… Raham Emanuel met with the WSJ editorial board…

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