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Thirsting over 'Daddy Newsom'

From feral comments to AI-generated romance novel covers, Gavin Newsom has unleashed a horny internet monster that is impervious to his shitty politics.

Tracy Clark-Flory

Aug 28

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I’ve spent the last several weeks gawking at the Daddy-fication of Gavin Newsom. Things have been moving in that direction ever since the election, but Newsom’s viral all-caps tweets parodying Donald Trump seem to have unleashed a horny internet monster that is totally impervious to his shitty treatment of trans people, the houseless, and labor unions.

Ever since Newsom started his trolling campaign, fans have been making Trumpian memes of him—say, shirtless while riding a great white shark or an eagle. Early on, I was pretty sure this was going to loop back on itself, that lampooning Trump’s toxic masculinist values would actually just turn into trying to win by those values.

And just like that, videos showed up on my FYP framing Newsom as a stud who could steal Trump’s wife. I came across a video of Newsom greeting Melania Trump with a cheek kiss, set to a soundtrack of Tupac rapping, “I fucked your bitch.” Another compilation of Newsom clips bore the title, “What Melania dreams of every night.” An AI-generated video showed a shirtless Newsom getting cozy with Melania and Ivanka Trump; another image placed Gavin and Melania on a romance novel cover. A commenter referred to him as “Chad Newsom.”

Let us pause for a moment to consider Judith Butler on satire:

Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony.

Hmm, I wonder which category “I fucked your bitch” falls under.

Then came the he’s-so-hot first-person testimonials—including, a man swooning about “Daddy Newsom” antagonizing Trump. “He’s kind of delicious,” he said. “The way he rage baits this man.” I came across a woman dancing sexily to Saweetie’s My Type with onscreen text reading, “Me when Gavin Newsom.” The caption: “An enemy of my enemy is my friend (especially if he’s hot).”

These videos weren’t trolling so much as thirsty. Cue the fan edits of Newsom looking hot, set to the usual songs: Ginuwine’s Pony, Salt-N-Peppa’s Whatta Man, George Michael’s Father Figure, Usher’s Daddy’s Home, and Cardi B’s WAP. There was even an edit featuring that viral meme of a lady grinding on her life-size skeleton to Rihanna. All the thirsty tropes came out to play.

The comments filled up with other memes: a little girl licking an iPhone screen, a woman spreading her legs, Jennifer Coolidge grabbing at her breasts. Just wait until some TikToker discovers this throwback article in which his ex-wife Kimberly Guilfoyle refers to him as “hung.”

People have been drooling over Newsom for a long time. I lived in San Francisco in the 2000s when he was mayor. I remember him being referred to as “Mayor McHottie.” I even started a satirical blog with a friend that was, in part, about Newsom being “the country’s hunkiest mayor.”¹ And it was not even the only such blog at that time! But this is different.

He’s no longer a 39-year-old “boy mayor,” as people put it back then; and he isn’t dating a model almost half his age. Now he’s gray-haired, approaching 60, a married father of four, and eyeing a presidential run. The satirical blog era is long gone, but Newsom’s social media parody of Trump has collided with the culture of over-the-top internet thirst. Instead of being called a “hottie,” he’s being begged to “wreck me, Daddy.”

Trump was Daddy-fied, too, of course. He got his own Daddy’s Home edits—the White House’s X account even posted one because we truly are living on the worst timeline—but those videos were selling authoritarian fantasies and propaganda. It wasn’t about women wanting to fuck him, so much as men like Tucker Carlson having a hard-on for patriarchal power.

These Newsom videos are about his fuckability, as well as his politics, which could only be considered progressive opposite Trump. People are drooling over him because, as that one TikToker put it, he’s both “hot” and “an enemy of my enemy.”

It makes sense, of course. In this era of “your body, my choice,” mocking Trump as a “beta” is an aphrodisiac for many women. On TikTok, a romance author compared him to the genre trope of dark romance. “The state of California is in a toxic relationship with this extremely morally gray man,” she says. “Seventy-five percent of the book he’s our fucking problem, until someone else threatens us and then he says, ‘Don’t touch her.’”

In other words, the thirst comes from being under threat.

The blog (and video series!) imagined us as TV news broadcasters intent on uncovering a conspiracy: the 80s sitcom Full House had actually been a reality-TV show, but a massive coverup had reframed it as fiction. What’s more, Gavin Newsom was secretly best friends with Uncle Jesse (they bonded over their hair).

Part of the bit was that our characters were obsessed with Newsom. They were reporting the story of a lifetime, but they were also in love. We pretended to collect hair from the welcome mat at City Hall and then make hair dolls out of it. (The hair dolls were real, but the hair was collected from my hairbrush.)

At one point, we ended up in the San Francisco Chronicle after staging a faux run-in with a local anti-Newsom figure at an event for political bloggers. (We threw drinks in his face; he was in on it, but no one else knew that.) We followed up with a faux kidnapping video, where we handcuffed said antagonist and combed his hair with gel until he confessed his love for The Gav.

Look, I don’t know what to say! It’s was the 2000s in San Francisco.