CHRIS BRAY: Gavin Newsom Is Playing A ‘Trump’ Character He Doesn’t Understand.

Newsom is not yet swaggering into campaign events in a wifebeater, but give him another week. The character he’s currently playing is a rude, crass, and transgressive, and not above dropping hints about coming up from the streets. Of Marin County, but whatever. If you haven’t seen what his hard-talking communications guy looks like, by the way, go take a look.

It’s a baffling performance, but last year the Bay Area lawyer and journalist Laura Powell gave us the key to understand it: Newsom is cargo culting, like a South Pacific islander watching the disappearance of military logistics efforts after World War II. “In isolated societies,” Powell wrote, “so-called cargo cults emerged when indigenous groups constructed imitation airstrips and towers, believing this would cause Western goods to descend from the skies as they once had, without understanding the actual forces that made the planes appear.” He’s performing a set of appearances, thinking that the images are the substance.

Men are turning away from the Democratic Party, so Newsom turned up last year on the podcast of Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL. As Powell noted, “Newsom laced his speech with curse words – roughly one per minute – and called Ryan ‘man’ or ‘brother’ with cringe-inducing frequency.” He talked a lot about football and guns, bro. Powell summarized the performance as Newsom “trying on a new mask.”

This year’s mask is modeled on the Shawn Ryan masculinity mask, but it’s a different version. It’s more directly a Donald Trump mask, but not quite: It’s a mask of what Gavin Newsom thinks Donald Trump is.

Both men were born into privilege, but Trump went on to create real estate and entertainment empires, while Newsom mismanaged a city for years and now an entire state.