The Meme President

“We actually elected a meme as President”, exclaimed a 4chan user in 2016, when Donald Trump was elected. Trumps’ win was a memetic insurgency against the establishment. Memes were relentlessly tested in marathon rallies, just as comedians test their material in basement clubs. The memes that performed best — "crooked hillary", "cucks", or "draining the swamp” — were then amplified by a 24 hour news cycle hungry for content. Forgoing traditional media campaigns, Trump’s son-in-law, Kushner spend half as much for double the effectiveness. "I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley, some of the best digital marketers in the world, and asked how you scale this stuff," Kushner says. They tested hundreds of thousands of Facebook ads a day, with tailored messaging, and used machine learning to target ‘low-information’ voters, in a campaign Facebook executives ‘showered praise’ on. Simply being talked about was enough. Trump harnessed controversy to get free coverage worth millions across every major news network. You don’t need to be politically correct if you’re a political outsider, a strategic advantage he aggressively leveraged against his opponents. His ideas were ridiculous, and as such were ridiculed, in the process: sharing them. Embodying the saying that there’s no such thing as bad news, Trump was simply the most visible candidate, and harnessed the power of the availability heuristic. Better the devil you know, than the shadowy political elite that you don’t.

Yet none of these tactics are new: Obama’s campaign pioneered many of the same techniques, such as digital-first advertising, rapid A/B testing of ad creative, and soliciting funding through a large volume of small donors. He also tapped into Silicon Valley’s talent network, hiring ex-Googlers who famously helped him raise an additional $60m thanks to a single A/B test. Three word chants of the type Trump employed like “lock her up” and “build the wall” are a time-honoured tradition: see Obama’s “yes we can” and (Bill) Clinton’s “putting people first”. Even “make America great again” is lifted from Reagan’s 1980 election campaign. That’s fitting given Reagan’s successful transition from entertainer to politician paving the way for Trump to do the same. When asked if he learned anything as an actor that was useful in office, Reagan responded, “There have been times in this office, when I wondered how you could do the job if you hadn’t been an actor”. Indeed Trump seemed confident he had mastered the memes of presidency, as he told a crowd in Connecticut “presidential is easy”, and provided his interpretation: a sober tone, a solemn facial expression, controlled gesturing, dignified head-nods. Memetics yields asymmetric results, because it’s cheaper to iterate on message than to actually change your substance. It’s the “social media equivalent of guerrilla warfare” according to Jeff Giesa, a Trump campaign consultant and author of a 2015 paper on Memetic Warfare. As such it favors the underdog — "all the power is in the hands of the people on the outside doing the disruption.” says John Robb, an ex-Military Terrorism expert. Memes can be used to increase disorder within a system – which creates an opportunity for an insurgency – but if the goal is to increase stability, it's the wrong tool for the job.

About the Book 📕

← Back to Essays 📝