US Politics
Newsom finds new way to troll Trump with website tracking president’s ‘criminal cronies’
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California Governor Gavin Newsom has found a new way to troll the Trump administration by launching a website that tracks President Donald Trump’s “criminal cronies.”
Newsom’s team launched the site Tuesday, along with crime statistics that show falling rates of violent crime across major cities in California.
“With crime dropping — again — California is proving what real public safety leadership looks like,” Newsom said. “Meanwhile in D.C., Trump is a felon who surrounds himself with scammers and drug traffickers.”
Trump is labeled “criminal in chief” in the news release, with the word “felon” branded across his 2023 mugshot.
“We’re providing the public with a resource putting the facts in one place so Californians, and all Americans, can see who he elevates and who he protects,” Newsom added.
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It is the latest example of how Newsom’s team is attempting to mirror the Trump administration’s own tactics and use public resources to target the president’s political enemies.
In the news release, Newsom said he was launching the website to detail “the criminal records, corruption cases, and extremist ties of the people Donald Trump elevates, protects, pardons, and surrounds himself with.”
Those featured in the line-up, complete with AI-generated mugshots, include the cryptocurrency Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, who was pardoned in October after pleading guilty to money laundering charges in 2023. The billionaire has ties to the Trump family’s crypto venture World Liberty Financial, which Newsom highlighted in the release.
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Trump’s pardon of the former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández, who the Justice Department once said was at the center of the “largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world,” also made the list.
Hernández was sentenced last year to 45 years in prison after he was convicted of accepting millions of dollars in bribes and importing 500 tons of cocaine into the United States.
Other offenders on the list include Ross Ulbricht, the founder of dark-web drug marketplace Silk Road who was pardoned by Trump in 2015, and former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted of multiple political corruption charges and also pardoned by Trump.
Newsom and his press team have been trolling Trump for months by mimicking the president’s own social media style of writing aggressively in capital letters and by generating AI memes at his expense.
