Newsom recounts a deliberate shift in messaging to break through a crowded news cycle after early successes against disinformation. He traces the pivot to a moment when Trump "invaded Los Angeles" and to coordinated disinformation by Trump and Elon Musk during the fires. Newsom says his team stopped being apologetic and began trolling instead of repeating affordability talking points that failed to gain pickup. Critics misread the pivot as solely willingness to confront Trump; the central aim instead was to alter media attention and force coverage rather than rely on policy-heavy messaging that went unnoticed.
And my state of mind radically changed at that moment. And our media shift [sic] changed. Our research, our clarity, the conditions changed, so we had to change. And we were no longer apologetic about things. I wasn't trying to play nice. And I know a lot of good people play nice. Talk about what you really focused on every day. And people will pay attention to your ten point plan on affordability.
The primary focus of Jong-Fast's interview with Newsom was about him breaking through the news cycle. From the very start, she dated his breakthrough to two weeks earlier (so around August 9), while he described the shift in his messaging strategy first to Trump and Elon Musk's disinformation during the fires, Those first few days they were winning the messaging battle. But as Newsom described, his state of mind changed when Trump invaded Los Angeles, back when I first profiled his trolling efforts.
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