California Gov. Gavin Newsom isn’t letting President Donald Trump — or his communications team — slide on anything. Days after Trump’s humiliating “piggy” debacle lit social media on fire, the White House attempted damage control with a glowing cleanup post from Communications Director Steven Cheung.
But instead of rescuing the moment, Cheung’s tweet only amplified it — and Newsom wasted zero time turning the whole thing into a punchline.
The whole mess began when Trump snapped at Bloomberg White House correspondent Catherine Lucey aboard Air Force One on Friday, jabbing a finger toward her face and snarling, “Quiet! Quiet piggy.” The clip went viral, but days later it ignited a bigger firestorm once CBS senior reporter Jennifer Jacobs posted it with a clear audio of the insult.
And then came Cheung’s cleanup attempt — a cheery X post insisting Trump was burning the midnight oil in the Oval Office on Wednesday night. “It’s almost 9:30pm and President Trump is still working in the Oval Office. The man never stops working for the American people! Incredible!”
Newsom’s press office pounced. Within hours, it posted an AI-generated image of Trump supposedly “working late” — except in Newsom’s version, Trump was slumped asleep with pig hooves for arms.
“That’s okay, he took a nap earlier,” Newsom joked, reposting Cheung’s own message for maximum sting.
The hooves sent the internet into hysterics. “The hooves took me clean OUT,” one X user wrote. Another added: “Nice touch on the hooves.”
Wednesday’s clapback came on the heels of a daily barrage of brutal “piggy”-themed posts that kept the humiliation alive. One showed Trump’s sleeping head on a prone pig’s body, captioned, “Good night, little piggy.”
Another morphing of Trump’s face onto a pig was paired with a mock New York Magazine cover: “Not Cruelty… It’s the Corruption, Stupid.”
And one of the most vicious featured Trump in his golden Oval Office holding up a photo of his ballroom — except he had a full caricatured pig face, complete with Trump’s swooped hair and a snarled, toothless grin. The caption: “Quiet, piggy.”
“I can’t even quantify my love for this,” said one user on X applauding Newsom while another added, “Same!!!! It’s perfect!!!!”
But Trump supporters tried to rewrite reality.
One insisted, “He clearly said ‘Quiet, Peggy.’” That effort was immediately torched. “Ok, then his cognitive functions are rapidly declining,” a commenter shot back. “There was no one there named Peggy.”
Newsom kept going. Another post featured side-by-side images: one of a bloated, grotesque depiction of Trump, the other of him shoving what looked like pork into his mouth. The caption riffed once again on “Quiet, piggy” — the insult Trump clearly wished would disappear.
Millions of views and thousands of reposts later, Newsom’s memes had turned any cleanup effort into a second meltdown for the White House. And when Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt finally tried to put a lid on it during a press briefing on Thursday, she only made things worse.
“Look, the president is very frank & honest with everyone in this room,” she said. “You’ve all seen it yourselves. You’ve all experienced it yourselves. And I think it’s one of the many reasons the American people reelected this president, because of his frankness.”
Critics were stunned that she described Trump’s attack as a virtue. “still don’t understand: how can a person get up every morning knowing daily work will be lies, lies, lies and just lies?” wondered Beck on X.
“Every reporter in that press conference should have shouted, “Quiet Piggy” -at the top of their lungs…. Karoline Leavitt is just gross…” added another.
Republicans doubled down too. Florida Rep. María Elvira Salazar excused Trump’s behavior entirely, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday that ‘No one’s perfect.”
“President Trump is a very picturesque and difficult and different type of politician. But I always say that I look at his policies and not at his personality,” Salazar told Tapper.
“No one is perfect. Those who are perfect are in heaven,” she added with a straight face.
Trump is well known for calling women derivatives of “pig.” The HuffPost reported that New York Times columnist Gail Collins remembered Trump telling her in 2017 that she had “the face of a pig.”
Trump called former Miss Universe Alicia Machado “Miss Piggy” and he called actress Rosie O’Donnell, who he’s been in a decades-long feud with, a “pig.”
