Gavin Newsom Slams Donald Trump's AI Posting Spree as Feud Explodes Into Viral War of Memes

California Gov. Gavin Newsom didn’t hold back after President Donald Trump’s latest social media blitz, and the internet quickly turned it into another chapter in their long-running feud.

After the president posted a wave of AI-generated images, including one depicting himself walking alongside a shackled alien at a military base, Newsom responded bluntly: “The President of the United States just posted this. Do you think he’s lost it?”

The image Newsom reacted to was one of 19 AI-generated posts Trump shared in less than 75 minutes. The visuals ranged from surreal to cinematic, including scenes of Trump aboard a spacecraft and sitting at a desk pressing a giant red button as explosions filled screens behind him.

Trump also took aim at Newsom directly, posting a doctored California license plate reading “NEW-SCM” alongside an image portraying the governor as a zombie-like figure.

Newsom’s team fired back in kind, reposting the image with the caption: “Even a Zombie Newscum still looks healthier than our current President. #PrayersforGrandpa.”

The exchange is the latest escalation in a feud that has grown increasingly personal as both figures trade insults across platforms.

“Political feuds like this are no longer just disagreements. They’ve become engagement engines,” said Ravi Sawhney, founder and CEO of RKS Design and creator of Psycho-Aesthetics. “The goal is not persuasion anymore, it’s emotional activation.”

He points to AI imagery as a key accelerant in that shift.

“AI-generated imagery accelerates that process because it compresses outrage, identity, humor, fear, and tribal alignment into something instantly shareable,” he explained. “From a Psycho-Aesthetics perspective, the image itself becomes secondary to the emotional participation it creates. People are no longer simply consuming political media, they are signaling belonging through reaction, reposting, and commentary.”

“Both sides benefit because outrage now drives visibility, fundraising, press attention, and algorithmic momentum,” Sawhney said.

He adds that the bigger shift is how quickly modern memes allow repetition to reshape perception.

“We are witnessing a modern evolution of an old strategy: when messages are repeated often enough, people begin to internalize them as truth,” he added. “Historically that happened through speeches, headlines, and propaganda. Today, AI-generated imagery can accomplish the same thing emotionally and exponentially faster through instantly consumable visual narratives that trigger reaction before reflection.”

As the feud continues, the images themselves — whether aliens, zombies or space battles — are almost beside the point.

“The image becomes the message,” Sawhney says.

“As synthetic political media becomes more common, we are entering an era where emotional resonance may matter more than factual consensus in determining what spreads,” he warns. “That is one of the biggest risks emerging in the AI era: systems can generate content at scale, but they still lack true human understanding of trust, emotional consequence, and long-term societal impact.”