Overview
- After a White House post calling Donald and Melania Trump “America’s power couple,” Newsom’s press office—adopting a Trump-like rapid-fire style—replied with a 1992 image of Trump with Jeffrey Epstein and the line, “The internet knows who the real power couple is.”
- Newsom’s team highlighted engagement metrics, noting roughly 151,000 likes for the Trump–Epstein image compared with about 40,000 for the White House photo of the Trumps.
- In a follow-up to a ‘Trump War Room’ post, the account paired an unflattering Trump McDonald’s photo with an image showing Donald and Melania Trump alongside Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
- The posts landed after more than 20,000 pages of Epstein estate documents were released on Nov. 12 and cited by Democrats, and Trump denounced the release as a “hoax” before later urging House Republicans to vote on making records public.
- Melania Trump’s legal team threatened journalist Michael Wolff with litigation over claims tying her to Epstein, and Democratic strategist James Carville removed parts of a podcast following involvement from her attorneys.