Gavin Newsom Is the AI Slop Candidate
The California governor is an uncanny amalgamation that is nothing and stands for nothing.
“AI slop refers to low-quality, mass-produced digital content—text, images, video, or audio—created by artificial intelligence with minimal human oversight.”
At least, that’s what Google Gemini says before allowing me to see a single human-written result.
To be online in the 2020s is to be aghast at our collective plummet into an abyss of crude and inane content. The era of AI slop made the situation markedly worse overnight, as accounts launder LLM responses to prompts as their own content and post fake videos to drive engagement. Even OpenAI has had enough of those insufferable videos.
Now, slop threatens to consume what remains of our politics. While President Donald Trump was the first U.S. president to embody slop, the Democrats have found an eager counterpart: California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Much like Trump, the churn of Newsom content posted from his various accounts is mind-numbingly stupid in a way that feels intentional. Crude sexual content, doctored and AI-generated images of his opponents, troll posts written in Trump’s cadence, former President Barack Obama and Trump fighting in the ring. And that’s just in the header image.
The primary difference between Newsom and Trump’s online behavior is that the president’s content feels authentically unhinged, a digital projection of the president’s runaway id. Newsom’s content is so cynical that his entire being feels more akin to an aggregator: recycled SEO and viral-bait content often ripped off from better sources designed for nothing more than engagement boosts.
Newsom’s politics are as unstable and desperate as his online persona. What should we do about homelessness? Provide services, but throw folks the hell out of here. Do Democrats need to support LGBTQ rights? Yes, except no. Is Israel an apartheid state? Of course, but absolutely not. We could do this all day.
There’s something sinister in how remarkably little moral conviction Newsom possesses, as though his algorithm is updating his persona so rapidly that it doesn’t allow for even a semblance of continuity from one day to the next. The notion of Gavin Newsom as an avatar of sociopathy has existed within the public discourse since the first time someone noticed his resemblance to Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of American Psycho played by Christian Bale in the movie. Newsom leans in for engagement.
All of this would be nothing more than a curious story in the dystopian trajectory of American politics if Newsom retired to a cushy private sector job at the end of his term. Instead, he’s expected to be a serious presidential contender for the Democrats, who allegedly hate Trump for bearing so many analogous qualities to Newsom that it’s easy to lose count.
Americans seem to notice the hypocrisy. Polling last month from NBC News showed that Newsom is less popular than Trump, with Trump underwater by 12 points and Newsom by 18. For comparison, Pope Leo XIV was up by 34, and Stephen Colbert was up 10 in the same poll. The least unpopular Democrat was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was down by 11. (Note that Trump’s approval rating is worse today than last month, but updated polling that includes Newsom isn’t yet available.)
The problem for Democrats with a candidate like Newsom isn’t just the intellectual disaster of running a campaign that feels designed by an unstable LLM, but that Americans cannot stand the state of the AI-consumed environment into which they’ve been dropped.
As a populist left voting bloc emerges in the Democratic Party and the general public experiences cross-party exhaustion from the juvenile chaos engulfing this country, Democratic leaders should think twice before doubling down on a slop candidate.