Did Kid Rock endorse California Governor Gavin Newsom in mid-August 2025? No, that's not true: The origin of the viral image is satirical. The picture was a parody of Donald Trump's post from the previous year, when he said he accepted Taylor Swift's nonexistent endorsement from an AI generated image.
What looked like a statement appeared in a post (archived here) on X on August 17, 2025. It showed an image of Kid Rock in front of the American flag. Words in the picture said:
Kid Rock wants you to support Gavin Newsom.
A comment on the contents of the image in the post read:
I ACCEPT! -- GCN.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: screenshot of a post by the GovPressOffice account on X.com)
The post was published by the official California Governor Gavin Newsom press office account.
That, however, was an apparent reference to another meme that had circulated on the internet a year before. In mid-August 2024, when an AI generated image of Taylor Swift with an inscription alleging she asked people to support Donald Trump was making the rounds on social media, Trump himself -- then a presidential candidate -- republished it on Truth Social, adding that he accepted the fictional endorsement. Lead Stories wrote about it at the time here.
The image was shared by Trump on his Truth Social account (archived here) on August 18, 2024. It was part of a collage of images that showed "Swifties for Trump."
(Source: Truth Social screenshot taken on Mon Aug 19 15:30:55 2024 UTC)
