August 19, 2025 - 8:00pm
As Democrats seek to rebuild their tattered brand, a consensus is emerging inside the party: MAGA needs a punch in the nose. “You see it every day, from California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s foul-mouthed declarations of redistricting wars to Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) mocking her state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, for using a wheelchair,” Axios observed this week. “Dems are tired of looking and feeling like chumps. They want to brawl, politically and verbally.”
Newsom is spending August locked in an ALL CAPS trolling odyssey of Donald Trump. The governor’s press office, eager to seize momentum amid the nationwide redistricting battle, has been posting as Newsom, but in Trump’s distinct style. A sample: “MANY PEOPLE ARE SAYING — AND I AGREE — THAT I, GAVIN C. NEWSOM (AMERICA’S FAVORITE GOVERNOR) DESERVE THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE.”
Having already started a podcast and chopped it up with the likes of Charlie Kirk, Newsom is embracing the MAGA meme wars. One ultra-viral post on X juxtaposed pictures of Newsom with JD Vance in high school with the caption “Chad Newsom > Chud Vance”. The governor himself cheekily reposted one of the memes that featured him as a brooding teenager and Vance in a men’s bathroom.
Meanwhile, influencer Harry Sisson, who couldn’t make it through The Adam Friedland Show without becoming painfully uncomfortable, is trying to get in on the action too. Last week, he posted a picture of himself with the note: “While weak MAGA losers were sitting on their phones gargling on Trump, liberals like me were taking our girlfriends out to dinner.”
Call it “alpha energy” — or at least an attempt at that. This is what rising centrist Elissa Slotkin of Michigan says Democrats need to channel as she tours the podcast circuit. But is that enough?
One Democratic moderate strategist told Axios the party needs “combative centrists”. “We’ve got to appeal to the gigantic group of voters who’ve left Democrats in the last 10 years,” he said. “Those people are not looking for socialism. They’re looking for fighters — but only ones who share their values.” This sounds eerily similar to the strategy behind Andrew Cuomo’s failed mayoral primary campaign, lazy as it was.
Left-wing populists, on the other hand, agree voters are looking for fighters but take that to mean the electorate is spoiling for a fight against centrism itself. These populists, though, often carry a decade of culture war baggage that can alienate voters who might otherwise embrace policies like universal childcare. This is why Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talked almost exclusively about kitchen table matters on their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour and why Zohran Mamdani has changed his tune on policies like defunding the police.
But this is also why centrists like Slotkin and Newsom are not about to win back podcasters like Joe Rogan and Andrew Schulz or the swing voters whose preferences they mirror. These party leaders aren’t interested in either substantive or stylistic critiques of the party establishment, which is exactly how Trump won over Republicans in 2016 and much of the new media in 2024.
Like Republicans in 2016, Democratic voters in 2025 do not trust the party establishment — and while tweeting like Trump is good for a laugh or two, the effect wears off when the troll avoids truly attacking the system in style and substance.
Take Slotkin, for example. After enraging Leftists for refusing to commit to cutting off offensive weapons shipments to Israel, the Michigan Senator offered a robust defence of her former colleagues at the CIA. “These are good, corn-fed people who just want to help their country,” she said on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show.
Trump and Sanders were clear that corruption is bipartisan and touches everything from foreign policy to Wall Street. Slotkin and Newsom are not. It’s possible that a Midwestern progressive like Tim Ryan, now weighing an Ohio gubernatorial run, offers the right recipe for “combative centrists”. He is more ideologically flexible than Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, yet just as sharp in his criticism of the system itself. But he’s likely still too far Left for the party establishment to rally around as an ideal candidate of the future.
It’s debatable, of course, whether Trump is actually delivering on the anti-establishment substance he promised the MAGA base. But he did actually make those promises, which was the rocket fuel for his ascent in the first place. Democrats could learn a similar lesson.
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