Sedition for the Lulz
The Trump Meme Legacy
By Arthur Jones, Giorgio Angelini and Maggie Angelini
Before the U.S. Capitol insurrection on January 6th, a new meme was passed around online. On its face, it’s a silly image, executed in the style of MAGA nation’s favorite painter, Jon McNaughton, creator of some of the more ludicrous Trump fan art. It depicts Trump as a mythical martyr, protecting his Sad Frog friend from unseen enemies. It was an invitation to sedition.
Ashli Babbit died storming the U.S. Capitol convinced that she was liberating the country from a cabal of pedophile Democrats. In her social media videos, she ranted incoherent streams of meme jargon, with each claim more incendiary and outlandish than the next.
Just down the hall from the scene of her death, a bare-chested man in a buffalo-horned headdress known as the “Q Shaman” stood behind the Speaker of the House’s podium while his compatriot snapped photos for Instagram, triumphant in a victory that few of them could explain. Now the “Q Shaman” is in jail.
The insurrectionists spent months ideating the U.S. Capitol siege on Facebook groups, Twitter, Parler threads and 4chan posts, convinced they would save America from tyranny. They indulged in a fantasy so detached from reality that by the time they found themselves shoulder to shoulder in a tear gas-filled chamber of the U.S.Capitol, many were unable to compute the gravity of their crimes. They wandered the edges of the chaos, blithely live-streaming the evidence of their own sedition. These are the casualties of our post-truth era, radicalized by an online culture war fought using memes.
Memes are visual slang, operating like in-group coded language. In the vast majority of cases, they can be a legitimately fun way to experience and comment on the dizzying speed with which our culture is changing. They’re digital snapshots, capturing a particular moment in time in a way that words alone cannot. There are meme communities scattered across the web, creating some of the funniest social satire around. Some are hyper-specific while others are made for mass appeal.
Memes also democratize political speech. They give people sitting behind their keyboards an active role in a communication system that has, until now, been passive. With their ease of sharing and inherent virality, memes are upending political hierarchies. Rather than politicians galvanizing voters through their own rhetoric, voters are now writing the script. It’s become an intoxicating challenge: make a meme compelling enough, and maybe the President himself will retweet it.
In 2020, during the most meme-ified year to date, we released our Sundance Award-winning documentary, Feels Good Man. The film’s title originates from a meme based on our cartoon protagonist, Pepe the Frog.
The documentary traces Pepe’s unlikely transformation from a goofy cartoon character in Matt Furie’s 2006 indie comic “Boy’s Club”, to one of the most notorious memes on the Internet, eventually becoming a designated hate symbol of the Anti-Defamation League. Pepe’s journey serves as an improbable decoder ring for understanding how we got here. Like millions of Americans, Pepe was radicalized online.
On September 30, 2015, a post on a 4chan message board accompanied by a meme of Pepe holding a gun warned, “Don’t go to school tomorrow if you are in the northwest…So long space robots.” The next day, nine people were murdered by a gunman at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. Thirteen days after the massacre, Donald Trump, still an outsider candidate for President, retweeted an image of himself as “Smug Pepe,” standing behind a presidential podium, touching his chin with a cryptic smile.
In an earlier era, if a candidate for President used an image associated with a movement of mass shooters, his career would’ve been over. But for Trump, Pepe was a memetic mission statement. A frog whistle to a particular group of aggrieved young men, and an invitation to these Internet-savvy trolls to join his burgeoning meme war machine.
Without a coherent political platform, Trump consolidated his constituency by appealing to their emotions. For many resentful Americans, he provided an intoxicating fantasy built, in large part, on memes. His meme warriors often leveraged existing fantasy worlds depicted by video games like “Call of Duty” or Marvel films, and situated Trump as the hero in an epic battle between good and evil.
An early hit was a meme shared by Donald Trump, Jr., in reaction to Hillary Clinton’s ill-conceived “basket of deplorables” speech. Clinton’s words confirmed conservative America’s persecution complex: liberal America looked down on them. The meme captured real emotional power that rallied social media followers into a populist movement.
The meme itself is a reworking of The Expendables film: Trump as Stallone, surrounded by his band of trolls and failsons. Trump-Pepe stands shoulder to shoulder with these figures, collapsing the virtual world and real life into a unified, dissociative goo.
The QAnon movement further galvanized Trump’s base, consolidating ideas of religiosity and persecution under a big-tent conspiracy theory. QAnon was created as a joke in the basements of 4chan, but carried upstairs to living rooms across America by middle aged evangelicals, convinced that Trump was a Biblical hero. Q prophecies spread on Facebook and Twitter and adopted as gospel by social media-worshiping Trumpists. Devotees were encouraged to ignore reality and follow “the white rabbit” into a constructed online wonderland, in which Trump was a messianic defender of “real” Americans. And social media algorithms kept them at peak engagement through an AI-curated doom scroll of never ending Q memes, steadily marching towards a fundamental break from truth.
Ashli Babbitt didn’t know she was dying for a meme. It is precisely what makes her death and this broader moment so deeply unsettling. Though we once had very clear delineations between our real world selves and our online avatars, as we spend more and more time online, interacting with anonymous bubbles, conflating tech-enabled interactions with interpersonal relationships, those two worlds begin to blur.
Coming out of the Trump era, the question will be, what will happen to these millions of Americans? As their Q prophecies fail to materialize, will their return to truth hasten? Or will they continue memeing deeper into the rabbit hole?
Ironically, perhaps Pepe can offer a glimmer of hope. In our first interview with Matt three years ago, during the darkest days of Pepe’s appropriation, Matt was nevertheless convinced that Pepe’s status as a supposed hate symbol would be fleeting. Matt believed that Pepe could change, and that we shouldn’t give trolls the power to define his narrative. This was more than just wishful thinking. Emboldened by a new partnership with a legal team, Matt began a systematic take-down of the professional racists and online hucksters who’d attempted to claim Pepe as their own. Facing off against neo-nazi Richard Spencer, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and many other, smaller players, Matt scored one copyright victory after another. He was reclaiming his legacy and, in effect, reclaiming reality.
Today, it seems Matt was right. Pepe has changed. He’s become an icon of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. He’s also the most used emote on the world’s most popular live-stream website, Twitch, where he’s deployed in dozens of playful versions reminiscent of his early days as an Internet icon.
As we move out of the Trump era and attempt to heal this divided nation, our democratic institutions, like Matt, must be resolute in their rejection of trolling, in all its forms, from political hucksters and conspiracy profiteers, to keyboard warriors. Democracy only works if there exists a shared social contract, a truth. Otherwise, there is only chaos. Matt learned the hard way that, as he says at the end of our film, “if you want to escape hell, you can’t ignore it. You have to go to the center of it.”
Arthur Jones and Giorgio Angelini are the creators of FEELS GOOD MAN, the Sundance award-winning documentary about cartoonist Matt Furie’s fight to reclaim his character Pepe the Frog. Maggie Angelini is a Co-Producer.
