How Trump’s Authoritarian Coalition Weaponises Internet Meme Logic “IRL”

“Damn Daniel! Back at it again with the white vans!” Says the narrator in a viral Internet meme from roughly a decade ago. You probably associate this meme with reactions of laughter or derision in the school corridor. Regardless, the meme remains in your mind years later.

Internet memes – colourful static photos, gifs, or short videos – are easy to recall. Constant repetition helps to reinforce the meme in the memory – your friend may have laughed at “Damn Daniel!”, repeating it back at you to re-elicit the laughter reaction. 

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. It was wondrous being able to send a jpeg of an overweight cat with “I Can Haz Cheeseburger?” text to your friend back in the day. You could take part in fun viral meme trends as part of a wider “Internet community”. 

The problem came when malign actors saw potential. You may have encountered Pepe the Frog, which demonstrated that meme logic could be used to communicate in code. Far right ideas could be hidden under plausible deniability of irony or “it’s just a meme, bro”.  

Many memes now go further, seeking to communicate complex ideas. In a meme I received the other day, Michael Scott screams with overlayed text: “Me when the AI bubble pops and the financial crisis hits”. The meme is funny, although subconsciously reinforces anxieties without providing any rational socioeconomic analysis. 

Some memes have also become completely surrealist and decontextualised. You might receive a “deep fried” meme of Mr. Incredible paired with the non-sequitur text “Skibidi toilet”. Memes such as these succeed in eliciting weird mental images, making the viewer laugh at a sudden self-awareness generated by the nonsensicalness. 

For all of the aforementioned reasons, Internet meme logic is powerful. Memes can lodge themselves in our memory, act as signals or markers for in-groups, communicate coded messages or complex ideas to recipients, and even elicit our imaginations non-consensually, all with minimal effort on the part of the creator or sender. 

As anyone can make and share memes, we are now completely inundated with them upon opening messaging platforms or new media networks. In fact, an individual or a group could sit down and craft hundreds of memes in a day if they really wanted – foreign intelligence troll farms do just that.  

Donald Trump and his authoritarian coalition have taken note, adopting Internet meme logic into their political presentation. I don’t mean they use Internet memes to increase their brand awareness as transnational corporations now do, nor that they exploit algorithms with shock content memes, as online commentators do. 

They do something far more pernicious – rather, the authoritarian coalition in the USA purposely uses coded messaging, plausible deniability, repetition, and surrealist imagery in real life settings, to hamper accountability and reading. 

A great example is the Whitehouse Annual Easter Egg Roll, where this year, Donald Trump talked about “four more years”, the war with Iran, and “family values” to a crowd of bewildered children while somebody in an Easter Bunny costume stood beside him. 

If this were an Internet meme satirising his Presidency, it would probably be funny and insightful. Instead, it was a real-life situation made into a meme. The situation was intentionally surreal to elicit a laughter reaction from those in the know. It contained coded messaging and constant repetition of not-actually-serious-but-actually ideas. 

You would note that in the course of that one day, Trump would likely have released tens of Tweets, signed several executive orders, and made other vitriolic announcements. He can produce hundreds of these low effort “meme situations” a day, overwhelming observers not only by “flooding the zone”, but with cruel surrealism too. 

When those decontextualised “meme” interactions add up and form a chain with a “random” narrative, outsider observers struggle to locate meaning. They might have thoughts like: “Did he actually say that? Am I imagining? What does that mean? Is this real?”

When every publicised interaction is turned into a surrealist meme, stuffed full of inside jokes, semi-disguised authoritarian messages, poorly explained complex ideas, or inane repetitions, observers struggle to critically and rationally analyse those interactions amongst the assault on their psychology and their senses.  

That intense psychological assault using meme logic can detract from accountability, and indeed from reading next moves. The uncertainty leaves observers doubting their sanity, distracting them from the real harms. They may suffer paradoxical laughter at some parts of the surrealist spectacle. They may likewise suffer uncontrollable rage.  

We should generally ignore Trump’s publicised interactions. He is an unwell simulacrum whose interactions are intended to harm observers’ minds while revealing as little as possible about the strategic moves of the authoritarian coalition. Instead, we need to look directly through him at the calculatingly cruel operators running the show. 

We may deal directly with them, eventually. If we do, here is a message we could send in their own language: 

For those who communicate normally, it says: “they won’t win, and justice will catch up with them”.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Donald J Trump

Licence: public domain.

No image changes made.