The CEO of Target is stepping down, as the embattled retail giant seeks to turn around its fortunes amid an ongoing customer boycott over its scaling back of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

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Sales at Target, which has almost 2,000 stores across the US, fell more than expected in the first quarter of 2025, and the retailer warned earlier this year that sales will continue to slip through the rest of the year. Target said people were scaling back spending over worries about the impact of tariffs and the state of the economy. The company also said customer boycotts affected sales.

The company scaled back many DEI initiatives in January after they came under attack by conservative activists and the White House.

The retreat created a backlash, and a poll in February found that Americans had changed their shopping habits and abandoned some stores in response to corporations shifting their policies to align with the Trump administration.

The content is deliberately rude, brash, self-aggrandizing and insulting — because it’s satirizing the president who uses his own social media platform to push rude, brash, self-aggrandizing and insulting content.

Some of Newsom’s conservative critics appear to be missing the point of the effort.

One Fox News host complained late last week that the governor’s online content “comes across as childish” and seems unbecoming of someone who’s “the governor of the biggest state in the union.” As HuffPost noted, a different Fox News host kept this going earlier this week.

‘You have to stop it with the Twitter thing,’ [former White House press secretary Dana] Perino said, before adding: ‘I don’t know where his wife is.’ ... ‘If I were [Newsom’s] wife, I would say, ‘You are making a fool of yourself, stop it’ … He’s got a big job as governor of California, but if he wants an even bigger job, he has to be a little bit more serious.’

.....In keeping with the shtick, Newsom’s office published a follow-up item specifically responding to the Fox News co-host’s criticism in the same way Trump tends to respond to his own media critics.

Link to tweet

.....Whether the right understands this or not, to criticize Team Newsom’s content as childish, foolish and fundamentally unserious is to necessarily criticize Trump’s content as childish, foolish and fundamentally unserious since the former emulates the latter.

A Politico report summarized the developments this way: “With an inescapable, smashmouth, all-caps-laden and meme-filled X account, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is holding a mirror up to MAGA — and MAGA doesn’t like what it sees.”

Or as the governor’s office put it, “ALMOST A WEEK IN AND THEY STILL DON’T GET IT.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been on a social media frenzy over the past several days trolling President Donald Trump by evoking his writing style in several posts, and while the strategy has been mocked by some conservative critics, even some MAGA heavyweights are admitting the social media blitz is starting to sting.

“He’s no Trump, but if you look at the Democratic Party, he's at least getting up there, and he's trying to imitate a Trumpian vision of fighting,” said Steve Bannon, former White House chief of staff under Trump and host of the alt-right podcast War Room, speaking with Politico Wednesday.

“He looks like the only person in the Democratic Party who is organizing a fight that they feel they can win. People in the MAGA movement and the America First movement should start paying attention to this, because it’s not going to go away, they’re only going to get more intense.”

Newsom’s posts have been varied, but generally target Trump and his administration, and in a manner mirroring Trump’s syntax and capitalization style. Among Newsom’s most viral recent posts include the reposting of an image depicting him on Mount Rushmore, and the posting of an image generated with generative artificial intelligence depicting him praying while surrounded by pro-Trump figures Tucker Carlson, Kid Rock and the late Hulk Hogan.