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Long Read: Derailing the Trump Train?

The Story of Donald Trump’s Election Victory and Defeat in Memes

By Loui Marchant

In November 2016, the results of the US presidential election sent much of the world’s media into a tailspin of shock and confusion. Among certain online communities, however, the news came not as a surprise but as a validation that memes had made a decisive nationwide impact. Many users of anonymous imageboard websites including 4chan and 8chan felt that they had played a role in granting Donald Trump the presidency and were declaring the so-called ‘Great Meme War’ won. In reality, the reasons for Donald Trump’s victory were – of course – complicated and nuanced. That said, there is no denying that his campaign and wider support network had harnessed a powerful new political tactic on a scale not previously achieved. As a result, the meme culture which came to prominence in Trump’s 2016 campaign has spilled over into American politics more widely in the years and elections since. 

Fast forward to November 2020, however, and the tables seem to have turned. Trump himself has led supporters in questioning the validity of the results, but the reality – barring a series of truly unprecedented and unlikely events – is that Joe Biden has won the presidential election. Is the ‘Great Meme War’ over? Or have the Democrats won this round?  Perhaps these aren’t the right questions to be asking; the worlds of electioneering and meme campaigning are too complex to fit the narrative of clear wins and losses. Nonetheless, analysing the changing memetic landscape around US presidential elections offers a fascinating insight into how online politics continues to shape and be shaped by real-world political events.


What is a Meme?

First defined as the cultural equivalent of a gene, memes are ideas and/or behaviours which pass from person to person through imitation. Internet memes may begin as one picture or comment online, but the successful ones spread; they are adopted by a network through sharing, copying and liking and they stir something in public mood or opinion which causes them to circulate quickly and for a long time. Like genes, memes mutate, and the Internet has proven to be their perfect petri dish. The tone and content of a meme will change depending on the beliefs of the audience it encounters. As an internet staple, cat memes are a great example. A funny picture of a cat may seem trivial but can be used to express support or distaste for other online content, to promote political campaigns or even to take a stand against terrorism.


The Republicans in 2016: Twitter, 4chan and ‘Feels Good Man’

Among the multitude of reasons that Trump has always been considered an unconventional politician has been his penchant for sharing his unfiltered thoughts on social media. As the 2016 presidential race got underway, Trump began using his significant online presence to promote his campaign. On 4chan, large numbers of users recognised a shared agenda with Trump; they openly praised his mocking of liberalism and his emphasis on ‘America First’. A portion of these new Trump fans were part of a growing alt-right movement, which has since come to dominate political discussion in the US. These were invariably white supremacists who often packaged their beliefs in ‘funny’ or ‘ironic’ memes to make them more palatable, and so they revelled in the misogyny and racism that peppered his tweets.

So began an online campaign termed the ‘Great Meme War’ by some 4chan and 8chan users. It was so successful in part because it was in open conversation with Trump himself. Throughout the election campaign, Trump retweeted memes created by his followers, they created memes based on the language in his tweets and he praised the new meme content, in a cyclical process. His team noted what was popular online and they ran with it in advertising, with language like ‘crooked Hillary’ and ‘basket of deplorables’ being prime examples. 

This is when a cartoon frog entered the picture. Pepe the Frog had been one of the most popular memes on sites like Reddit and 4chan for some time. The character originated in comic book artist Matt Furie’s light-hearted ‘Boys Club’ series. It first drew mass online attention when an inoffensive joke in which Pepe says ‘feels good man’ went viral. Before long, Pepe had been edited to have a facial expression to fit every emotion imaginable. If you wanted to express joy, anger, sadness or smugness in response to a post, you could reply with an appropriate Pepe. However, this was a meme that enjoyed much of its early popularity in alt-right circles, where there was annoyance at its increasing popularity among ‘normies’. Soon, the Pepe character started appearing in racist caricatures, abusive comment threads and white nationalist content. 

When Trump announced his campaign, many saw Pepe as his natural memetic mascot. Trump himself ensured that the connection was made when he retweeted an image of himself in the style of Pepe. Many of his most high-profile supporters, including his son, followed suit by sharing a range of Pepe memes. The ‘Feels Good Man’ documentary tracks how, once the association was made between Pepe, Trump and the alt-right, it was near impossible to shift. There were Pepe protest signs, Pepe costumes and shouts of Pepe at rallies, all of which were criticised by the character’s original creator but never fully addressed by Trump himself.


The Democrats in 2016: ‘Old Lady Yells at Frog’

The Clinton campaign was also working to produce and share internet memes supporting her cause with tactics like claiming the title of ‘nasty woman’ and tweeting ‘delete your account’ proving popular. It is worth noting though that Clinton’s overall approach to Twitter was far more official and traditionally political than Trump’s, and that this content generally generated fewer retweets.

Shortly before the election, Clinton’s team published an ‘explainer’ to highlight the links between Pepe and the alt-right but it was met with derision. The explainer had not taken into account another key reason for Pepe’s success: every post was shrouded in ‘irony’. The ‘Great Meme War’ and the cartoon frog were not to be taken seriously, and if anyone did take them seriously then they invariably became the butt of the joke. In this way, the alt-right and the Trump campaign could pretend the most controversial of their views were actually nothing more than a reflection of other people’s gullibility. By the time of Trump’s election, Pepe the Frog was a recognised hate symbol. Trump expressed no concern that he had, wittingly or not, endorsed the ideas that the meme had come to represent.

Trump did not win the 2016 election because of memes, but his openness to them and ability to create them did buoy his popularity in some circles and their overall influence at the ballot box can never truly be measured. Moreover, his decision to court certain memes had appeared to empower a new brand of extremism in the Republican Party which would prove hard to eliminate. 


The Republicans in 2020: Violence and Conspiracy 

Over the course of his presidency, Trump continued to court his online fan base in speeches and in thousands of tweets per year. In the run up to the 2020 election, he was churning out tweets at a faster rate than normal and with new meme content to tackle his opponents. His various tweets and retweets accused President-elect Joe Biden of being a socialist, a creep and even a ‘pedo’. Meme makers ran with these ideas, perhaps hoping they would stick. The notion of the ‘Trump Train’ leading the campaign to victory also drew a lot of support. Trump tweeted out a ‘Trump Train’ campaign video made by a fan and retweeted an image of a CNN reporter being hit by the ‘Trump train’.

As in the previous election, Trump supporter memes had incredibly disturbing real-life consequences. Following encouragement from Trump’s son, a convoy acting as a physical ‘Trump Train’ tried to force a Biden campaign bus off the road in Texas, resulting in the cancellation of three Democratic events. Trump tweeted praise of the supporters involved. Even more concerningly, the QAnon Conspiracy gathered pace alongside the election campaign. This right-wing conspiracy theory makes the claim, without any evidence, that a cabal of elites including Democrats run the world while maintaining a secret trafficking operation and paedophile ring.  Followers believe that Trump has been attempting to expose this group and bring them to justice. Since 2018, a host of violent incidents can be tracked to the influence of QAnon. The FBI have branded the movement a domestic terror threat, but Trump has refused to condemn it, calling its followers lovers of the country.


The Democrats in 2020: ‘The Left Can’t Meme’?

After Trump’s victory, Democrats had four years to consider how they could engineer greater memetic success in 2020. Right off the bat, Democratic presidential nominee Michael Bloomberg demonstrated that lessons had been at least partially learned. He partnered with the Meme 2020 project to flood the internet with paid memes promoting his campaign with self-deprecating humour. Bloomberg had recognised the power of memes but not fully understood what actually makes them ‘memes’. Good memes form as a series of imitations; they are a conversation among internet users. Anyone can buy a funny online advertisement, but the meme comes from the groundswell of virality. If that can be bought, it is not in such an overt way.

As campaigning progressed, however, it became clear that the Democrats had new memetic skills in their arsenal. The Trump campaign launched the ‘Keep America Great’ slogan but it was Biden’s team who sought to mutate the meme by buying the domain. His campaign  team also capitalised on the online reaction to a fly landing on Mike Pence’s head during the Vice-Presidential debate with memes and fly swat merchandise. The left had their own conspiracy theories (see #FakeMelania). They even adopted their own version of Pepe; Gritty, the Philadelphia Flyers has enjoyed life as a meme for several years and has increasingly been used by leftists as they challenge one or more of the interconnected injustices of capitalism, the alt-right and Trump.

The effort to stop a second Trump term saw a variety of online communities coming together to disrupt his campaign. For example, young fans of K-pop (a genre of South Korean music) have become adept at using their own memes to disrupt right-wing memes, having frequently flooded political hashtags with ‘fan-cams’ and other irrelevant content. In June, these fans facilitated real-life disruption when they reserved tickets to a Trump Tulsa rally so that his campaign team would grossly overestimate turnout. In October, they worked with social media users in the LGBT+ community to drown out content created by the neo-fascist Proud Boys organisation with pictures of proudly LGBT+ individuals expressing love.


The Election Outcome: Not VERY STRANGE After All

Trump’s defeat was in no way easy to call. It was made possible by the hard work of thousands of grassroots and high-profile campaigners. It is not easy to measure how much the changing world of internet memes contributed to the outcome, but there are arguably three ways in which the meme landscape helped Biden secure victory.

Firstly, tech companies may not have created watertight ethical standards, but they have had time to improve protocols around undeclared paid content, the spreading of fake news, the use of fake accounts, and the wider manipulation of social media to help memes spread. This was a change that had repercussions across the political spectrum in the lead up to the election, but more so for the Trump camp. Trump himself found that his tweets had started appearing alongside warning labels questioning their accuracy. His aforementioned ‘Trump Train’ video was removed by Twitter for infringing copyright law in its use of the song ‘Electric Avenue’.

Secondly, there is a convincing argument that in the midst of a real-world pandemic, Trump’s campaign was actually too focused on internet memes. Ultimately, just one in five US adults use Twitter and, while more than two thirds use sites like Youtube and Facebook, online name-calling and in-jokes may well pale into insignificance for a citizen who has lost a job or a loved one. In the days leading up to the election, Trump was tweeting frequently about conspiracy theories and internet laws when someone more in touch with the electorate might have focused their Twitter content on Covid-19 or the economy.

Lastly, as exemplified above, Trump’s opponents have been more persistent and tactical with their memes this time around. This has continued post-election, as an expression of joy at the outcome and as a political strategy to drown out Trump’s accusations of fraud. Perhaps too, the Democrat camp has found the balance between the online and the offline; Biden’s recent tweets tie in with his recent political pledges and almost all focus on getting healthcare and the economy back on track.


Looking Ahead: Memes Continue to Mutate

While Biden waits to be sworn in, internet memes continue to influence the political climate he will inherit as president. Despite Trump’s prophesised win failing to unfold, Marjorie Taylor Greene has become the first self-declared QAnon supporter to win a seat in the House of Representatives. Videos of violence between Trump supporters and counter-demonstrators at a post-election rally in Washington DC have spread and been met with threatening language online. Internet memes still clearly have a potentially dangerous influence over real-world events. 

However, if there is a prime example of how memes can mutate and lose their former political power, it is last year’s surprising adoption of Pepe the Frog as a mascot by pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong. For these protestors, Pepe had no alt-right associations, and was simply a freedom fighter for all. What this turn of events proves is that no meme is entirely global, permanent or immune to mutation or reappropriation.

In the wake of the 2020 US presidential election, there remain questions for tech companies, political parties and individual citizens alike about the value, ethics, manipulation and success of memes. One thing, however, appears to have been proven true over the course of the 2020 election; in popularising the concept of a political meme, Donald Trump’s supporters have created a force now far outside of their control. 

Loui Marchant is a researcher and contributor to The International. You can follow her on Twitter here.