California Governor Gavin Newsom has turned his fire on a new target in the Trump camp, adding a franchise-inspired spin to his latest broadside.
Newsom took aim at President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Thursday with a mocking X post reinterpreting a classic movie poster, casting the pair as Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels’s characters from Dumb and Dumber.
The poster depicts Trump as Daniels’s character Harry Dunne, while Bessent, cast as Carrey’s character Lloyd Christmas, pulls at his hair. Trump is shown tugging at Bessent’s ears in the back-and-forth gag.
Boldly emblazoned across the top, the poster says, “SCOTT BESSENT AND DONALD TRUMP: DUMB AND DUMBER,” with a tongue-in-cheek line borrowed from the original poster underneath: “For Donald and Scott, everyday is a no brainer.”
Newsom’s press office captioned the post, “DUMB AND DUMBER! These two RUINED our great American economy!”
The 58-year-old governor, who has adopted the same all-or-nothing tone and bravado as Trump in his X posts, spent much of Thursday on the platform blasting the administration’s handling of the economy.
Trump, 79, and Bessent, 63, were hit with a devastating inflation report on Tuesday, showing prices up 3.8 percent from a year ago. In April, the country saw the highest single-month increase in food-at-home costs since 2022.
Grocery prices, which Trump vowed to bring down on the campaign trail in 2024, are up 2.9 percent from a year ago—an extra burden on Americans who are also paying 43 percent more to fill their cars with gas compared to a year ago due to the president’s war on Iran.
Newsom previously went after Bessent in March, when he labeled the Treasury secretary “Bootlickin’ Scott Bessent,” in an X post calling out the Trump administration’s public claims that the U.S. is not heavily reliant on the Strait of Hormuz—despite reports that Treasury officials warned Trump that oil prices could stay elevated due to Iran’s closure of the waterway.
The officials’ prediction appears to have proven partly accurate: more than 10 weeks after Trump launched his war against Iran, oil prices remain elevated, and gas prices have kept rising.
Meanwhile, Americans’ approval of the president’s handling of the economy and his overall job performance continues to crater.
A devastating new CNN poll found that 77 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, blame Trump’s policies for recent cost-of-living increases.
The poll found that 70 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy—up from 56 percent in March 2025.
The White House and the Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
