WHEN TOTALITARIAN SOCIALISTS MEET: Mr. Newsom goes to China. On his recent trip to China, the California governor met with President Xi Jinping to talk clean energy, clean transportation, and climate action. But he couldn’t resist a glamorous photo op.

Later that night, Newsom’s press team posted photos to Flickr showcasing the governor’s day at the wall. One of them in particular caught the attention of folks back home. In it, Newsom, sporting aviators and a crisp white shirt, leans one arm against the wall and looks off into the distance, mouth slightly ajar, the late afternoon sun beaming across his face as the wall snakes into the mountains behind him. From that pose (all studied nonchalance) to that hair (salt and pepper and coiffed just so), he looks like the romantic lead of an action movie.

Mockery ensued.

People took to X, the website formerly known as Twitter, to superimpose his photo on different backgrounds: homeless encampments, workers in a mine, the oval office. “The new Ann Getty’s rug,” cracked one commentator, referencing the infamous 2004 Harper’s Bazaar spread where Newsom and then-wife Kimberly Guilfoyle — dubbed “The New Kennedys” — lay together on the floor of an ornate room in Ann Getty’s mansion. (“One of the most glamorous political unions since Jack and Jackie,” the article gushed of the then-San Francisco mayor and his spouse.)

In politics, a photo tells a story more so than anything else. The Great Wall photo elicited a lot of eye rolls, but it was far from the most important image to come out of Newsom’s one-week trip to China. That would be the photo of him shaking hands with Xi — a political feat at a time of geopolitical tension that would be nearly impossible for any other governor, and hard for even national leaders, to land.

Did Newsom take any governing tips from the man who has locked up over a million Uighurs in concentration camps and welded people inside their homes when COVID hit?