07 ISSUE XI
MAY 2026
MAY 2026
The meme Team
Donald Trump’s form of political communication reflects the embedding of internet meme culture in politics, with far-reaching consequences for the future of democracy.
By Xavier Moyssén Álvarez
On May 02, 2025, the US White House official X account posted an AI-generated image of Donald Trump posing as the Roman Catholic Pope, wearing a white cassock and a pointed miter, the traditional headgear of bishops and other clergy. This image was posted 6 days before the official announcement of Pope Leo XIV's election. Several outlets criticized President Trump’s meme for being insensitive to Catholics all around the world, since the past Pope, Francis, had died just 11 days before, on April 21.
Image via Know Your Meme.
This was just one example of the use of inflammatory memes by the White House and other US government agencies, posted on social media as a form of political communication.
Other remarkable examples include the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posting on X a meme-style screenshot of the video game Halo that read “Destroy the Flood,” referencing a type of hostile enemy fungus in the game’s franchise. This tweet was an advertisement promoting the International Customs Enforcement (ICE) and recruiting people to join the agency. In this post, DHS implied that undocumented immigrants were the real-life equivalent of infected enemies one must destroy, or in this case, deport.
A much more aggressive image was posted on September 6 on Trump’s own social media platform, Truth Social, depicting him as a soldier in the Vietnam War, which happened during the 1960s and early 1970s, with the city of Chicago on fire and under attack by helicopters. The post read, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning. Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of War,” which is how the US renamed the State Department in Trump’s second term. In the image, the title “Chipocalypse Now” was written in reference to the film “Apocalypse Now,” which, ironically, was an anti-war film about the Vietnam War.
These memes, particularly the ones depicting President Trump, are not done by White House staffers themselves, but by a group of content creators referred to as the “300 Dilley Meme Team.”
US politicians have always utilized new forms of communication to address their respective nations. During the first half of the twentieth century, the most important technological advancement for broadcasting, both politically and commercially, was radio. For example, President Franklin Roosevelt found radio a very effective tool of communication, which allowed him to spread his messages to the nation without revealing his physical condition. However, contemporaries, such as his predecessor Herbert Hoover, criticized FDR’s use of radio as a propaganda machine, and there was general caution about the medium’s ability to mold public opinion, which could easily be abused. Around this time, the use of propaganda was beginning to proliferate in the political realm and was gaining importance. This incremental use of propaganda coincided with the rise of Fascism in Europe, which relied heavily on cults of personality around figures like Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini. These cults of personality were supported by new forms of mass media and innovations in film, best exemplified in the works of German film director Leni Riefenstahl.
During the second part of the twentieth century, television took the stage as the dominant form of communication. John F. Kennedy thrived on the visual stage because of his handsome looks. Commentators at the time were concerned about the personification of power in Kennedy's hands. As one of them warned, “Mr. Kennedy has become synonymous with the U.S.; his victories are American victories; his health, American health; his smile, his family, his hobbies, his likes and dislikes, become symbolic of the country. For all this … the press is largely to blame.”
If the 20th century was dominated by radio and television, the 21st would be dominated by the internet. In 1991, the World Wide Web was launched, and its importance as a way of communicating grew exponentially. Because of the internet's early, deregulated nature, several political actors used it to spread their ideas. Both the far left and the far right have used the internet to create forums and meet people online. For the far-right, this proved to be extremely valuable, since white nationalists could enter these communities while keeping anonymity. The nonexistent entry barrier makes the internet an incredibly easy path to radical ideas and a fertile ground for recruitment. In 2012, American Renaissance, a white nationalist magazine, stopped printing and transitioned to an entirely online format. Stormfront, created by David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, was born online. It is in these types of forums that what is now called the Alt-Right was developed.
There are several differences between the alternative right and the traditional right, even if there are some overlaps. While they are both conservative movements, the traditional right tends to place greater emphasis on ideas of civic nationalism: freedom, free markets, the American dream, and capitalism. The alt-right puts more focus on ethnic and cultural identity, particularly related to whiteness and the anxiety surrounding “the great replacement” theory, which culminates in a virulent opposition to immigration and ultimately racist beliefs of white supremacy. Culturally, the alt-Right assumes “the aesthetics of counter-culture” and “[harnesses] the mythos of the moral transgressor as a heroic individual.”). Because the internet was the place of development for this ideology, we can consider the Internet and the alt-right “twin brothers.”The gradual expansion of these forums also began to utilize memes, which presented a friendly face to ultimately radical ideas. These worked as shibboleths that only people within the movement could really fully understand, most notoriously Pepe the Frog. The meme of Pepe is now cataloged as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League. The online meme wars have emerged from the margins of the internet and exert significant influence on political views and decision-making in the United States.
By the time Donald Trump descended from that escalator to announce his 2016 presidential run, the Alt-Right online ecosystem had already been well established, but never represented in mainstream politics. Dominique Cagliuso examined how many of Trump’s policy interests and talking points overlap with those of the far right: mostly related to immigration and chauvinistic nationalism. Also, Trump’s rhetorical style– abrasive, rude, confrontational, and politically incorrect– is what you’d expect to see in an online troll. In this candidate and president, who was an unapologetically rude, White, Christian, heterosexual, nationalist man, the Alt-right found somebody to root for. Not to mention, the majority of his verbal attacks already came from online platforms, mostly on Twitter, now X. Of course, this rhetorical style is what you often see in populist discourse.
The historian Federico Finchelstein’s “elements of populist discourse” are present in Donald Trump. Finchelstein argues that populism relies on a quasi-religious politics: a charismatic, messianic leader embodies “the people,” while opponents are cast as enemies and traitors, and the movement equates itself entirely with the nation. Trump fits the profile.
Populist politicians claim that anyone who disagrees or doesn’t follow the policies set forward by the leader is therefore a “traitor” of the people. Trump has used the adjectives “activists” or “rogue” to describe judges who challenge his actions in court, and has even gone as far as to call democrat officials “seditious”. In light of the second “No Kings” protest that took place in October of 2025, Trump’s Truth Social account posted an AI-generated video of him in a fighter jet, wearing a crown, and dropping feces on protesters. These videos, as well as the other AI-generated images, seem to be red meat for his Alt-Right followers – the intention is not to communicate, but to troll. In my opinion, this appears set to become the future of online political communication in the post-modern world.
Austrian researchers Ingulfur Bludhorn and Michael Deflorian (2021) define “re-politicization” as part of the post-political condition: “a distinction between politics as a more or less formalized, institutionalized process, and the political as the irreducibly plural and irresolvably conflictual.” While apathy is lamented, dissenting voices and emergent movements are stigmatized as irrational, immoral, irresponsible, or even dangerous for challenging the dominant consensus and the latter’s claims to objective truth. Re-politicization would be injecting life into the condition of the post-political consensus. It would be a way of bringing the political back, the naturally confrontational aspect of democracy. Theorists such as Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau believed that populism was a legitimate democratic means of questioning the established liberal order and the political status quo. I wonder if the future of political communication in the digital age is to inform through the way of irony. If people have lost faith in the system as a rational way to engage in politics, the natural consequence is to engage with it through mockery, hyperbole, and trolling. For example, California Governor Gavin Newsom has started to “troll” Trump by using AI-generated videos himself. Zohran Mamdani’s very effective campaign for New York City Mayor was also heavily inspired by meme-like aesthetics and new social media communication methods. The challenge that the left and all opposition parties to the Alt-right have is to catch up.
Xavier Moyssén Álvarez is a PhD student in sociology at the New School for Social Research. His work focuses on the intersection of violence, state theory, and media. He is from Mexico.