California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), whose official “@GovPressOffice” account has been posting increasingly vicious attacks on President Donald Trump, crossed a line Tuesday by mocking the release of Israeli hostages.
In a post on X, Newsom quoted a White House post of a photograph of Trump with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and responded by adding a photograph from the movie Dumb and Dumber.
The post was deleted after more than 13 hours online, and after severe criticism from people who were offended that the Governor of California would mock the release of 20 innocent hostages who had been kidnapped by Hamas terrorists during the October 7, 2023 attack.
The post also appeared to reflect poorly on the Democratic Party, portions of which have cultivated an intense hatred of both Trump and Netanyahu.
The backlash would almost certainly have been even stronger, had the post not been published on the Jewish holiday of Shemini Atzeret, when observant Jews are offline. The date also marks the second anniversary of the October 7 attacks on the Hebrew calendar.
No apology was forthcoming from the governor’s office.
Newsom’s press office did not delete another, similar post that also mocked the hostage release by drawing attention to skin on the president’s neck in a Time magazine cover story about the hostage-and-ceasefire deal.
Newsom has thinly-disguised presidential ambitions, and the posts will almost certainly be used by future opponents to argue that he is unfit to conduct the foreign or national security policy of the United States.
The “@GovPressOffice” is run at Newsom’s direction by staffers, including Izzy Gardon, who boasts of his role in the account and frequently engages in side skirmishes with conservative critics on social media.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Zionist Conspiracy Wants You, now available on Amazon. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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