Fox News host Dana Perino attempted to defend her pearl-clutching toward California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s trend of trolling tweets on Tuesday’s episode of “The Five.”
But doing so required her to ignore the reason for the governor’s recent mockery of Donald Trump’s social media style and insist Newsom is just being a copycat.
Newsom has recently been mocking MAGA by mimicking the president’s all-caps online posts, complete with insults and ludicrously narcissistic praise of himself.
In the process, Trump lovers like Kid Rock have gotten themselves in a MAGA tizzy over the posts.
On Monday, Perino suggested with a straight face that Newsom has “to stop it with the Twitter thing,” claiming he was “making a fool” of himself in the process.
Many people on social media mocked Perino’s complaints about Newsom’s posts because many of them are direct copies of previous Trump posts. As a result, she faced accusations of hypocrisy and having a partisan double standard where mean tweets are concerned.
Newsom’s Press Office responded with an all-caps post that began, “DANA “DING DONG” PERINO (NEVER HEARD OF HER UNTIL TODAY!) IS MELTING DOWN BECAUSE OF ME, GAVIN C. NEWSOM!”
Perino attempted to defend her pearl-clutching by saying, “We get the joke,” though her excuse required her to be humorless.
“He was reading tweets that were written for him by people that he is heavily investing in to try to help him look more like Trump, I guess,” she said. “I mean, I thought they hated Trump, but they’re trying to be more like him and they have to pay people to do it.”
She also insisted that the problem she had with Newsom’s posts is that they weren’t authentic.
She added: “You’re trying to do somebody else who you say is Hitler, and you think that we don’t get the joke. Oh, no, we get the joke. It’s just not funny.”
Perino’s co-host, Jesse Watters, also seemed a bit miffed at Newsom for following the lead of the GOP’s fearless leader.
“They claim conservatives don’t get the joke, we do ― we just think you look like a tool,” he said without irony.
Both Perino and Watters’ lame defenses of their partisan double standards were mocked by others on social media.