Will the Democrats go "dark woke" to take on Trump?

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0:38BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. On the podcast today, we're going to be talking about Gavin Newsom, the California governor who has come up with a bold new strategy that some people are calling dark woke. So we'll be asking what it means when he's taking the fight to Donald Trump online in very Trumpian terms. But sadly, we have to start with yet another school shooting that's happened in America in a church in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning. This is Thursday morning, U.S. time when we're recording this. Anthony, bring us up to date with what we know so far.

1:12Anthony Zurcher:Well, we know that there have been two deaths. Two children were killed in this shooting. It was at a school that is affiliated with a church. It happened during morning mass proceedings. The assailant also subsequently killed himself. we know the name of that assailant we have a little bit of background on motivations but it seems like there was no political agenda to this but the investigations are ongoing the the weapons that the assailant purchased were done so legally police have discovered more weapons in different different homes and facilities so it is obviously a tragic another tragic shooting in this country one that brings back memories of Sandy Hook, the elementary school in Connecticut, where someone went in and killed more than a dozen, I believe, schoolchildren there.

2:06Anthony Zurcher:And Donald Trump and other public officials have made public statements about it. The flags are flying half-mast at the White House and in federal buildings. And the community is just beginning need to come to grips with the latest. Yeah. And the assailant who actually identified as a woman more recently and had changed the name from Robert to Robin. And there are quite a lot of online, I don't know if you would call them manifestos or articles or something that I guess try and point towards some kind of motivation. It's so difficult to even get yourself into the headspace to try and understand what could ever motivate anyone to do something like this.

2:44But Marianna, I assume, You know, there's plenty of people online combing over everything they can possibly find out about the assailant. Yeah, there are. And in some ways, this feels like the new blueprint for when there's a shooting or an attack, particularly in the United States, that, you know, everyone will find the social media accounts of that person, whether it's a YouTube account or whatever that might be. In this case, lots of people have been looking at some of the videos that have been shared by the shooter and trying to kind of figure out what drove them to that. I'd say something that I've noticed actually and you know there are still various unanswered questions about the motive here and why this happened and it's always very hard to make sense of violence like this anyways.

3:26But it feels to me like it's become even more muddled in terms of what drives people and why. It used to feel like perhaps more quickly there would be a kind of, right, this is the reason this happened. But because in the social media age, people are exposed to a whole range of different ideas and they might go down certain paths or express certain quite niche references that you almost need to decode in order to figure out what they believe or what's their ideological motive or not and so on. And, you know, we're going to see that unfold over the coming days. And people will sometimes take from those clues online, perhaps what they want to.

4:02Other times we struggle to sit with the idea that people can do something senseless like this for perhaps complex or no reason at all.

4:09Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, there's a term that's being used more and more now for these types of shooting. It's called nihilistic violent extremism. The nihilism just means nothing. There's no motivating or clear motivating factor. the assassination attempt on Donald Trump also kind of falls into that category where it is very difficult to discern any kind of a motive. And we probably will find out more about this story in the coming days and weeks, in which case we'll definitely keep you up to date with it. But for now, let's pivot ourselves back to what we originally planned to talk about. And that is the California governor, Gavin Newsom, and his very interesting new online strategy.

4:48And is this a way for the Democrats to finally start effectively fighting back against Donald Trump. Welcome to AmeriCast. AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. You're gambling with the lives of millions of people. You're gambling with World War III.

5:06Anthony Zurcher:President Trump's message is very simple. We are done being taken advantage of. Mr. President, in the name of our God, have mercy upon the people who are scared now. Are you supportive of these onesies? I'm supportive of vaccines. What is happening? Like, this is not America. This is a terrible nightmare. This is what victory feels like. Yeah!

5:36Hello, it is Sarah here in the BBC's Washington Bureau.

5:39Anthony Zurcher:It's Anthony, sitting next to Sarah here in Washington. And it is Mariana, a.k.a. Misinformation, in the worldwide headquarters in London. again, but alone, because Justin's on his holidays. Now, Marianna, Anthony, you're very well aware that one of the questions our AmeriCast has asked us the most often is, where are the Democrats? What are they doing? Why are they not fighting back against all of the things that Donald Trump is doing? And the answers to that are many and varied, but one has popped up in the form of Gavin Newsom, the California governor, who's always been good at attracting attention, but he has formulated this new strategy, it seems.

6:17to take on Donald Trump. I mean, listen to this, for instance. It's just what he said before signing the Election Rigging Response Act, which was passed in California in response to Republican plans to redraw the political map in Texas. We're here because Donald Trump, on January 6th, tried to light democracy on fire, tried to wreck this country, tried to steal an election, as Alex just said, by trying to dial in for 11, almost 12 ,000 votes. And here we are, an open and plain sight before one vote is cast in the 2026 midterm election. And here he is once again, trying to rig the system. He doesn't play by a different set of rules.

6:57He doesn't believe in the rules. And as a consequence, we need to disabuse ourselves of the way things have been done. It's not good enough to just hold hands, have a candlelight vigil and talk about the way the world should be. We have got to recognize the cards that have been dealt. And we have got to meet fire with fire. Anthony, you were all across what was happening in your home state of Texas when they redrew the political map there. What exactly happened?

7:25Anthony Zurcher:Right. And they passed that now. So it actually has been redrawn. It might got tied up in the courts. But at least for now, what Texas did was draw the lines of congressional districts. Texas has a whole bunch of members of Congress that go to the House of Representatives in order to make it more likely that more Republicans could win. Maybe even five more Republicans could represent Texas in the House of Representatives than in this last midterm or the last elections in 2024. And five Democrats would be booted out. In response, California said, well, if you're going to play that game, we're going to do it, too.

8:00Anthony Zurcher:A little trickier for California because they have to get voter approval for it. It isn't just the legislature that redraws the maps. But this press conference was Gavin Newsom announcing the beginning of that voter approval process where their maps could, in theory, eliminate maybe four Republicans who represent California, replacing them with Democrats. All of this obviously is with the goal of getting a majority in the House of Representatives, a majority that right now the Republicans only hold by about three seats. Fascinating, isn't it? Because it's potentially a very double-edged sword.

8:33So, I mean, your short-term goal is to try and make sure that there aren't more Republicans in the House of Representatives just because they were able to redraw a map. There's another side of it, which is saying, OK, we are going to fight you on the same territory. If you're going to do these aggressive things, we're going to be aggressive, too. We're not just going to take this lying down anymore. Democrats have been accused of being a bit too supine recently. But in a wider sense, a lot of the Democrats' arguments against what the Trump administration are doing is that it's against the rules, that he's not playing by the rules, even if those rules are, in fact, the U.S.

9:05Constitution. And they're forever attacking him, saying he's doing all of these things wrong, he's undermining our democracy, he's threatening the rule of law in this country by doing all of these unprecedented things. If you just meet him on the same territory, haven't you lost half your argument?

9:21Anthony Zurcher:I guess that would be what certain groups, liberal groups would say that, you know, the high ground is the place to be. You remember the famous Michelle Obama line? No, our motto is when they go low, we go high. And I think that increasingly is becoming not enough of a reason for Democrats to stick with it, that they just feel like desperate times call for desperate measures. We should probably start by defining what this term dark woke means. So it's a term that people started using in January of this year. And it refers to a shift in tactics or a desire to shift in tactics when it comes to the Democratic Party and liberal politicians, particularly social media strategies, but beyond that.

10:12So instead of following the rules, being very polite, it advocates being much more direct and sort of aggressive, going head to head with Donald Trump or copying some of those tactics. And it uses woke, that term that is often used to describe the Democrats, but is subverting it. A bit like dark MAGA, which we've chatted about quite a lot, a kind of variation of Make America Great Again. Again, being a little bit sneakier and a little bit more aggressive in your tactics. and Gavin Newsom has been one of the first people from the Democratic Party who's actually been trying to do that, you know, this podcast that he started doing but also posting on social media.

10:46So on X, for example, where quite a lot of perhaps more liberal politicians have either been very by the rules, formulaic, quite sort of statement-like. He's actually started going very much sort of toe-to-toe with Donald Trump. The press office for the governor or any governor are usually kind of quite boring but they've been sharing things like this, this meme it shows um gavin newsom on the the it looks like the cover of time magazine and it's like long live the king and a successful liberation day thank you it's in capitals which is parodying donald trump obviously almost always writing in capitals certainly on truth social his site and this whole king thing again has been a huge meme in the manga world so it's very much like playing him at his own game and slightly taking the mickey out of it i guess but also using it to be like right well we can be like this too i think that there are positives to that in so much as it gets you the visibility the eyeballs and people see you as being able to sort of take a bit of a joke or take you know to to not be very po-faced or too serious but the flip side of it is that a lot of the people you're trying to appeal to possibly don't like that strategy very much from donald trump they don't find it's like taking politics seriously and it might not necessarily appeal to the people he wants.

12:01And Donald Trump has kind of already done it. So does it work to just do what he does? Like, do you win over the MAGA base? They're not going to go for Gavin Newsom, surely. Well, it's not really a direct appeal for votes via the memes, is it? If we look at some of the other images that are really eye-catching that he's posted online. So a shot of Mount Rushmore with the four presidents' faces carved into it. And they've mocked up to look like Gavin Newsom's faces there as well. Well, that's, you know, something that we've seen of Donald Trump online or a picture of a particularly sort of muscle bound looking Gavin Newsom wearing a vest or a tank top, a short sleeve T-shirt and with a huge big American flag looking very kind of iconically American.

12:42You know, these are deliberate parodies of Donald Trump style images that he's putting out there. So it's quite it's a reasonably sophisticated trawl in that respect, I guess, and just trying to undermine the iconography that the Trump campaign uses.

12:57Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, satire is difficult, obviously. I mean, it's a fine line to walk. And there's certainly been politicians who have opposed Donald Trump who have tried to do it. I remember Marco Rubio in 2016 when he was running against Donald Trump for the presidential nomination, was making fun of the size of his hands and and taking swipes at Trump that way. And there are plenty of others who have who have done that and ended up demeaning themselves, making themselves smaller by comparison, because Trump was just so uniquely good at the kind of derisive humor and mockery that other other politicians just doesn't come naturally to.

13:38Anthony Zurcher:I will say, looking at this, I mean, it is, as you say, it's pretty sophisticated. I think I've talked to people on the left who have found it amusing. Obviously, they don't think this is a way to actually win, but at least it kind of bucks up the spirit of the base and makes them feel like someone is trying to go toe to toe with Donald Trump. I think there's going to have to be more more to it than that. There's obviously going to have to be a positive message and a message that will connect with with voters, because that was the key to Donald Trump. It wasn't just the mockery. In fact, maybe it was even in spite of the mockery that he won.

14:13Anthony Zurcher:He won because he promised voters that he could make things better and shake things up. And and that, you know, that the economic message and that message to kind of the populist base in this country was was probably the key to his victory, not being able to write in all caps and picking fights with Rosie O'Donnell or whoever else. He's picked up a star from somebody we know as well, where he started posting on social media and finishing his post with thank you for your attention on this matter, which is, of course, how Donald Trump finishes a lot of his truth social posts. And also, you guys have probably all noticed how Justin Webb has started signing off a lot of his texts to us as well in our WhatsApp group chats.

14:53But also, I think that this is a really important point, which is all of this social media strategy is good for getting eyeballs, but it's only good if you have something for the eyeballs to consume or look at. And one of the problems that Kamala Harris grappled with, if we cast our minds back to the brat summer of 2024, etc., was that it felt really light in terms of ideas and policy. Whereas with Donald Trump, it felt like the ideas that are being represented through his different social media posts and strategies are clear. Again, whether you like or hate them, they are very clear. And I think that will be the test for Gavin Newsom.

15:28like he can use this kind of satire to draw people in or to give an impression of what he's like as a person doesn't take himself too seriously is willing to sort of face up to Donald Trump all those kinds of messages but those are ultimately a little bit futile if there's not more to go on and I would say that I'm really interested by when when we when we heard that that clip from him and how he was talking about the you know the democracy stuff and the threat to democracy and we're here because of January the 6th. Like if he's going to go down that route, the kind of Donald Trump is a threat to democracy thing, that didn't really work out like last time around.

16:03Actually, it felt like people kind of had got over it. They were like, man, was it really? You know, again, regardless of what you actually think about whether it was, it didn't feel like it landed in the same way as points about the economy or immigration do. And I just wonder whether he risks falling into a trap that other Democrats have before, which is actually the whole Trump is a threat to you doesn't really do very well when you're trying to win over that middle group of people who voted for him last time.

16:28Anthony Zurcher:I think there's a certain amount of truth to that. Although, you know, we've been talking about the midterm elections, which happened next November, so just over a year from now. Midterm elections are more about motivating your base and getting people who may vote in presidential elections, but don't really pay attention to down ballot races, get them to turn out to the polls. So I could see how a strategy like this that that tries to animate your base, buck them up, get them get them motivated and turn out. That might be as good as one that that deals with kind of those larger presidential election themes when you're appealing to a much, much larger electorate than you will next November.

17:09Anthony Zurcher:Although there is a contrast. So we see Gavin Newsom on one side. We see the Illinois governor, J.B. Pritzker, taking a more kind of a pugilistic attitude, not so much with humor, but more with like, you come after my people, I'm going to get you. It's interesting to see how different Democrats are going about this differently. But it is the governors who are the ones who are kind of drawing the line in the stand. They're just doing it in different ways. Yeah, J.B. Pritzker, as the governor of Illinois, he's about to go toe-to-toe probably with Donald Trump, who wants to send the National Guard into Chicago in the same way that he has with Washington, D.C.

17:44And I mean, he was absolutely coruscating about it on Monday. There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention and ask if they want their neighborhoods turned into a war zone by a wannabe dictator. No one. We have made no requests for federal intervention. None. Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city. I mean, so that that really is taking the fight to Trump and not necessarily in this high minded and theoretical threat to democracy kind of a way. That's the sort of pugilistic tone that might also buck up a few Democrats.

18:22Anthony Zurcher:Chicago street fight sort of way, which is, you know, kind of his thing. And actually, you know, Donald Trump has leaned into this as well. I mean, he just had a post just moments ago while we've been recording saying Governor Pritzker had six murders in Chicago this weekend. 20 people were shot, but he doesn't want to ask me for help. Can this be possible? The people are desperate for me to stop the crime, all caps, something the Democrats aren't capable of doing. Stay tuned, all caps, President DJT. He didn't say thank you for his attention, but he signed it, which he also sometimes does with his true social post.

18:55Anthony Zurcher:But it seems like, you're right, we're heading towards a showdown with National Guard troops maybe being sent into of Chicago. Trump has said he has the power to do this. Pritzker has said they're not welcome here. So, you know, that could be a very different kind of a contrast to what Gavin Newsom is doing with the mockery and the kind of PR blitz. That's such an important point, because all of this only matters if it's not just a conversation happening between politicians, but actually between voters themselves as well. And what I would say is, you know, you look at some of the stats. So if we take Gavin Newsom again, this Gov Press Office account, which is the one that's been putting out loads of the memes and capital letter posts and everything, it has really grown its reach.

19:39It's got more than 250 ,000 new followers, more than 225 million impressions, according to the governor's office. I mean, you can tally that up if you look at the numbers, it does about match up with that. But this is all on X. And what I would say, again, is that if you were thinking about like how you reach voters or how you build a certain reputation or aura around you online, X is a very valuable place at the moment to people who lean further to the right. And so while the Twitter of pre-Musk might have been the place that you could actually kind of make a lot of noise, and it still is the place where you can do and say stuff and there are stunts and stuff gets picked up and it influences the news cycle, but it's kind of only if other people really, really engage with it.

20:22And you wonder whether it's an example of the Democrats feeling again, like a bit behind the curve. Like to me, it feels like this X battle was the one to have last year.

20:31Anthony Zurcher:And that's kind of been a challenge for Newsom. And if you track what he's been doing over the past few years, he actually started a podcast. And on that podcast, he was bringing on conservatives like Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk, and got a lot of criticism for platforming people that Democratic voters, Democratic primary voters who are going to be casting their ballots in the presidential election in 2028 just revile. So he actually seemed like he was costing himself some support within the Democratic Party by appearing to transparently move to the middle and reach out to to possibly Trump voters or at least engage in dialogue with them.

21:11Anthony Zurcher:Also, early on this year, when Donald Trump came out to visit and review the fire damage in Los Angeles, Newsom met him on the tarmac. They shook hands. They talked about how they could work together. So it seemed like in the beginning, Newsom's strategy was conciliation and working with Trump and also reaching out to right wing voters. And then you get this kind of handbrake turn. And part of it was because of the immigration enforcement in California and the National Guard. All of a sudden, Newsom was put in a position where he felt like he had to object to what Donald Trump was doing, this massive intervention at the federal level in Los Angeles after these demonstrations.

21:50Anthony Zurcher:And since then, that's when he has been tacking back to the left with this social media strategy and these sharp criticisms of Donald Trump. And and he has now been getting criticism from some people who say, well, you're using your social media feed in order to to engage in mockery and kind of belittlement when a state governor should be using it for things like informing the public about emergency issues or fires or or as a as a means of communication. He actually responded to that as well. And this is what Newsom had to say. If you've got issues with what I'm putting out, you sure as hell should have concerns about what he's putting out as president.

22:28Um, so to the extent it's gotten some attention, I'm pleased. Um, but I think the deeper question is, um, how have we allowed the normalization of his tweets through social posts over the course of the last many years, uh, to go without similar scrutiny and notice.