California Governor Gavin Newsom has launched a fresh round of attacks on President Donald Trump in his unrelenting campaign to reality-check the MAGA base.
Honing in on Trump’s grand reopening of the freshly paved-over Rose “Garden” on Friday, Newsom rebranded the concreted area the “Predator Patio.”
“Welcome to Predator Patio! Admission? Just prove you’re on the Epstein List!” the Newsom Press Office account wrote on X. The tweet was accompanied by an image of Trump holding a microphone, superimposed over a shot of the dinner held in the garden on Friday.
Newsom did not stop there. The press account launched a stinging rebuke of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson for attending the event.
“After ripping health care from 17 million Americans and slashing food stamps for kids, we’re glad Mike ‘Marie Antoinette’ Johnson and his boy friends had time to toast the grand opening of the Predator Patio,“ Newsom’s press office wrote on X.
Johnson was instrumental in passing Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” in July. The bill, it has been estimated, could leave 17 million Americans at risk of losing health care coverage. It also cuts $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program over the coming decade.
During the pandemic, Newsom found himself compared to Marie Antoinette—the luxury-loving last queen of France—for attending an indoor, 12-person fine-dining experience while advising Californians to maintain social distance and mask up.
Newsom continued his tirade over Trump’s dinner for Republican allies in a third message. Replying to the same tweet, Newsom trashed the hypocrisy of the luxury meal for the newly formed “Rose Garden Club.”
“Our economy is in a downward spiral, but don’t worry—the @GOP are spending their time cheersing Diet Cokes at a new, exclusive ‘club’," Newsom wrote on his own X account.
The Trump administration’s latest economic report paints a bleak picture of the impact of the leadership’s policies.
Trump fired his statistics chief, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, in August, claiming she was manipulating data for political ends. Even so, the jobs report released Friday shows just 22,000 new jobs were created in August, far below the projected 75,000.
The report also revised down the June figures, showing a net loss of 13,000 jobs in the month. The unemployment rate climbed to 4.3 percent—its highest level since December 2021.
Trump’s inaugural Rose Garden Club dinner was attended by Vice President JD Vance, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, as well as Johnson. Trump told guests on Friday that the club is for “people that can bring peace and success to our country.”
Newsom has been on an all-out social media offensive against the Trump administration—often satirically referring to himself as “America’s favorite governor,” a nod to Trump’s penchant for describing himself as “America’s favorite president”—ever since the president deployed Marines to Los Angeles in June.
