According to Sun Tzu, in order to know your enemy, you must become your enemy. Some politicians might be taking that advice a little too literally, though.
Zohran Mamdani’s notably deft use of social media helped lead his well-run mayoral primary campaign to victory in June—and it may have inspired some recent pivots from other politicos.
Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo is now taking a kitchen-sink approach to replicating his mayoral opponent’s social media magic, while California Governor Gavin Newsom has taken to mimicking Donald Trump in an ongoing performance art piece on one of his X accounts. Neither seems to have a broader strategy beyond capturing attention.
Memes and mimicking online
Fresh off of copying Mamdani’s distinct video style upon reentering the mayoral race as an Independent, Cuomo is now trying to flex his own social media fluency, with memes and a reply-heavy X account. In between the rash of posts attacking his opponent, Cuomo has been interacting with many of his followers and posting the occasional clunky meme from The Office.
Fund the police pic.twitter.com/Q6xKhjV3T8— Andrew Cuomo (@andrewcuomo) August 19, 2025
Fund the police pic.twitter.com/Q6xKhjV3T8
Apparently, this is just the beginning.
Jason Levin, whose bio claims he builds “software for meme marketing and memetic warfare,” took credit for Cuomo’s memefication on Monday. In a thread posted to X, he recounted how his first meme for Cuomo hit 5.1 million views on the platform, with a triumphant tone more befitting someone who has just received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. “We are entering a golden age of meme’fied politics,” he wrote in one entry in the thread, urging his followers to take up arms (read: memes), and help “save NYC.”
Meanwhile, Governor Newsom also seems to believe we have “entered a golden age of meme’fied politics.” Since the beginning of August, he has been taking a punchier approach on X, with the occasional clunky meme from The Office. The effort peaked last week, though, when Newsom began an elaborate trolling campaign against Trump, in which his tweets favor the president’s all-caps, nickname-forward, syntactically challenged, self-worshipful style.
DONALD IS FINISHED — HE IS NO LONGER “HOT.” FIRST THE HANDS (SO TINY) AND NOW ME — GAVIN C. NEWSOM — HAVE TAKEN AWAY HIS “STEP.” MANY ARE SAYING HE CAN’T EVEN DO THE “BIG STAIRS” ON AIR FORCE ONE ANYMORE — USES THE LITTLE BABY STAIRS NOW. SAD! TOMORROW HE’S GOT HIS “MEETING” WITH…— Governor Newsom Press Office (@GovPressOffice) August 15, 2025
DONALD IS FINISHED — HE IS NO LONGER “HOT.” FIRST THE HANDS (SO TINY) AND NOW ME — GAVIN C. NEWSOM — HAVE TAKEN AWAY HIS “STEP.” MANY ARE SAYING HE CAN’T EVEN DO THE “BIG STAIRS” ON AIR FORCE ONE ANYMORE — USES THE LITTLE BABY STAIRS NOW. SAD! TOMORROW HE’S GOT HIS “MEETING” WITH…
In an effort to show he’s willing to stand up to Trump—or, let’s be real, more likely in an effort to lay further groundwork for his inevitable 2028 presidential bid—Newsom is acting on social media as though he were a Good Terminator sent back in time to stop the Bad one. Whether these efforts have had any meaningful impact on Trump is debatable, but what is beyond dispute is that this social media strategy has earned Newsom loads of attention.
Cuomo trolls desperately for votes
The attention a politician generates with memes or trolling, however, is not necessarily relevant if they don’t match it with something more interesting to say.
Social media fluency, after all, is not political fairy dust. In 2025, we’re well past the point where a politician using memes, in and of itself, suggests youthful savviness. Michael Bloomberg went all in on the best memes money can buy in the 2020 election, and failed to move the needle one iota. A decade into Trump’s political era, everyone has already been to this circus and seen these clowns. What they want instead are leaders.
Throughout his campaign, Mamdani used social media to highlight key issues around the central theme of affordability, reveal his personality, and showcase transparency. His various accounts built off the organizing prowess of his ground game to make his progressive ideas more widely palatable and to give them moral heft. His posts were generally earnest and informative, and slyly packaged in smart experiments like his daylong walk across the entirety of Manhattan. Now that he has won the primary, his social media has an earned sense of triumphalism—as in a recent video filmed backstage at a Wu-Tang concert at Madison Square Garden—along with a whole lot of smoke for his opponent, Cuomo.
If Mamdani has gotten a major boost from his social media usage—and he undoubtedly has—it’s because it seems like a natural extension of the candidate himself. All that Cuomo is doing with his flailing efforts at being epic on social media (something Elon Musk has proved is no pathway to popularity) is reveal his desperation for capturing attention. That thirstiness leaves room in his tent for Trump supporters, like his new meme contributor, along with Trump himself, whose support Cuomo is actively, openly courting (despite him being less popular among conservative voters than both Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa and Mamdani).
Posting—shockingly—is not politics
As for Newsom, the best that can be said of his new social media trolling persona is that it’s drawing attention to the hypocrisy of Trump’s supporters in the media. Those anchors on Fox News who find Newsom’s schtick “childish” and “unbecoming of a leader,” for instance, should indeed have to answer for why they don’t attribute those traits to the guy Newsom is imitating.
But the problem is that all this trolling is just empty calories. Newsom’s Bizarro Trump act is an attention-getting spectacle. It’s a one-note comedy routine, not a form of leadership. He could keep this up every day for the next three years and it would never make more of a material impact than his recent pledge to redraw the district maps in California, in order to match a gerrymandering effort underway in Texas. (It’s worth noting that this issue is what initially kicked off Newsom’s ongoing Trump impersonation.)
If there isn’t more evidence of substance behind the style soon, all that remains will be “tiny hands” jibes, and beating the TACO thing to death. Whatever shape this performance does ultimately take, though, Newsom’s new bit is unlikely to stick with potential voters longer than his aggressive crackdown on homeless encampments, his vanity podcast with right-wing provocateurs, or his scapegoating of trans people.
Given the full context of what people know about Newsom, his impersonation of a Trump-like narcissistic megalomaniac threatens to hit observers as something more than an impersonation. Getting attention, after all, is far less important than what one does with it.
No comments