Trump Is America’s First Meme President

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0:38You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:47My name is Meher Ahmad. I'm an editor for the New York Times opinion section. We talk a lot about how Trump has changed, some would say defined, our politics over the last 10 years. But he's also leaving an enormous mark on our culture. Like it or not, he's changing us right down to the way that we speak, and in turn, how we think. I'm here with linguist Adam Aleksic, the author of Algo Speak, How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language. He recently wrote an essay on the topic, Four Times Opinion, and opinion columnist Tressie McMillan Cotton, a sociologist who is a keen observer of the intersection of culture and politics.

1:23Adam, Tressie, welcome.

1:25Tressie McMillan Cottom:Hi. It's a real pleasure. So, before we jump into the finer points of Trump and language, I wanted to ask each of you, when you first noticed what an effective communicator Trump is, I think a lot of critics easily dismiss him as a speaker because he kind of breaks all the rules of public speaking. He goes on long wanders, sort of doesn't complete his sentences, and yet he's kind of magnetic to watch and listen to. Tressie, when was that moment for you? So I grew up with Donald Trump on reality television, like a lot of people. I didn't expect him to fail at communicating with people. I also tend to pay a lot more attention to sort of like everyday politics and how people speak about it in layman's terms.

2:03Tressie McMillan Cottom:And so while he may not have sounded presidential to those of us who have a very clear idea of what that is supposed to sound like, I thought, well, but he does sound like people who talk about politics at the bus stop. He sounds like the way we talk about politics when we're still just learning and developing a facility for political speech. So I think I always thought that he was quite effective. That is not the same thing as being good. It is not necessarily the same thing as being presidential, for sure, to Adam's point in his essay. But I always thought that he was an effective communicator.

2:35Adam Aleksic:Meher, you mentioned there are like rules to what it means to be an effective communicator. I think those rules are entirely in our head, or rather the elite population's head as we judge correct grammar and prose and whatever. Trump does not follow those rules, but to most people, that is actually kind of a sign of relatability. That is an effective communication tactic. Effective communication also means talking in ways that work for certain mediums. And when he first really hit the scene presidentially in 2015, 2016 for that campaign, he was very good at using TV as a medium, which is just get people's attention so that you'll be aired in more news segments.

3:14Adam Aleksic:So you're constantly generating more news. And he was very effective at communicating in a way where he would show up way more in the news than any other candidate in the 2016 primary. So I think that was the first time I started thinking about that. Adam, in your guest essay, you made the case that Trump's language is changing how we speak. There's turns of phrase in the essay that I almost didn't realize that Trump had popularized, like many such cases. And there are many such cases. So what are some of the other ones that you were able to identify and track? Yeah, many people are saying this.

3:45Adam Aleksic:So many people are saying, you've got to run again. They love the job we do. A lot of people are saying, maybe we like a dictator. But I hear my friends say things like sad as an interjection. That literally comes out of a Donald Trump tweet. Fake news is a term which at least was popularized by him. Oh, fake news CNN? I'll hold it. Oh, yeah, yeah, here we go.

4:06Tressie McMillan Cottom:A great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me.

4:09Adam Aleksic:And believe me at the end of a sentence. But I think the biggest impact was his phrasal templates, which are kind of sentence skeletal structures, which you can sub in certain words. So thank you, X, very cool. Make X, Y again. This has been the worst X in the history of Y maybe ever. And these are all sort of placeholders for you to put in your own memes or words or apply them to new situations which let them live on a life beyond Trump. Same with all these words. They're all adaptable to new situations. And what is it about those specific words or phrases that, like, resonates and is able to penetrate so deeply into our culture?

4:42Adam Aleksic:There's a few things going on. I think the adaptability is a really important point to pay attention to because the way memes spread is you can apply them to new contexts. if it's just one context, it goes viral that one time and then it doesn't spread. So it needs to be moldable to new situations. And linguistically, that means those kind of Mad Libs style phrasal templates are fantastic. Also, when you say many people are saying this or many such cases, you can apply that to literally any time multiple people are saying something. That's a very easily adaptable meme. And it's a funny turn of phrase.

5:14Adam Aleksic:So that's another point, not just adaptability. It needs to be memetically fit, which is a kind of a nebulous phrase, I guess. But to be funny in the online medium, things spread usually in the form of jokes, in the form of online memes. And meme in that sense is just a funny Internet kind of ha ha moment. And it's funny when Donald Trump speaks strangely. And we know he speaks more strangely than other presidents. There was that study from the researchers at the University of Chicago where they proved that he has a demonstrably unique syntactic style. That's kind of what we were just talking about with the informal speech and the way he doesn't talk presidentially.

5:50Adam Aleksic:In fact, that could be quite good for him in this day and age. Tressie, is there any Trumpisms that stand out to you as particularly interesting?

5:58Tressie McMillan Cottom:I also think that the sad, that one jumps out at me quite a bit. You know, one of the things that Donald Trump uses very well, Adam points out, is humor. And we have really struggled with this in sort of polite, elite discourse where we associate humor with being a low form of communication. But humor resonates deeply with a cross-section of people and especially among younger people. And I have thought a lot about and written some about how much we underestimated the power of humor in being able to become, as Adam points out, mimetic. Right. One of the things that Donald Trump does is he doesn't just use the medium.

6:36Tressie McMillan Cottom:He really does embody the medium. He is the Internet. He embodies what makes the Internet so powerful. And he has used the communication infrastructure, how we joke, how we like to be ironic, which I would also point out to people. The use of irony there, I think, has made Donald Trump very popular, not just with conservatives, but with liberals. Liberals really lean into ironic humor. And Donald Trump just provides so much of that. He's almost entrepreneurial in how he will just keep throwing out these templates, right? He'll actually throw out about 500 and maybe only 10 stick. But if no other politician is throwing out any, then 10 seems huge, right?

7:19Tressie McMillan Cottom:And so I think anything that kind of has that sort of ironic humorous bent tends to stand out because you don't actually need to. Adam's a really great point. You don't need to know why the content was originally funny. It only needs to be funny in the context where you apply it. And Donald Trump is very, very good at supplying us with those. Whatever the actual meme is, beneath it is that the humor resonates with people.

7:43Adam Aleksic:Yeah, there is something so important to comedy. You look at what these algorithms are doing for this second election where he got reelected. Algorithms played a much stronger role in the election. First time was more of a TV based election. And this is now the algorithms are engagement optimization algorithms. And what that means is if people are engaging with it, it will go more viral. And things that people engage with include memes, jokes. They don't engage with boring, monotone elite discourse. I'm sorry.

8:13Tressie McMillan Cottom:That one hurts. Well, there's a lot of ways in which, like, Trump himself, I think the language that he uses ends up kind of moving into the Internet sphere. But there's also the memeing of his actions. So kind of Trump dancing or Trump is a Sith Lord, but other kind of aspects of him that also inspire virality, like that weekend when many people on Twitter were saying he was dead. There's some aspect of this, too, where I think Trump is funny, whether intentionally or not. Some people don't find him funny. I do find myself laughing often. either at him or with him in some cases, just because of the way that he, like, mocks the people around him or in front of him.

8:52A lot of that funniness, though, seems to come from a place of authenticity, where he just seems like an unfiltered person compared to so many who are in the public eye, definitely politicians, but even celebrities, where so much of their public appearance is kind of through, like, lens of how they would be perceived by a wider audience and it just seems like Trump doesn't care. Tressie, do you feel that way? Also, do you think he's funny?

9:20Tressie McMillan Cottom:Yes, I probably think Donald Trump is funniest when he is not trying to be funny. His actual attempts at jokes are, I think, quite sad. He does not understand the structure of a joke, I think, because he doesn't have the self-awareness. I think that's why he doesn't do well at something like, you know, the White House press dinner, but he does great in a presser where he can do this sort of free-flowing repartee with the media. He uses the media as a stand-in for a live audience. I saw him many times on the campaign trail, for example, and he could not do a 10-minute tight set to save his life.

9:55Tressie McMillan Cottom:But he can generate this sort of organic call and response with an audience that sort of organically and spontaneously produces these moments of levity and humor. Now, I will say a lot of that humor is punching down, right? It is cruel. I think it appeals then to this sort of effective desire of extreme emotions. And cruel humor also feels a little transgressive to people, especially I think if they think that the culture had moved so far towards, you know, being safe and being politically correct. And so there's a certain amount of transgression that his humor gives the audience permission to dabble in that I don't think would work if he was actually trying to be funny.

10:38Tressie McMillan Cottom:I tend to find him most funny and not in a way where I think it weakens him, which is I think some of what we tend to think will happen, that if he is funny, then he is less powerful. What he has figured out is how to use humor in the context of presidential power to use one to further the other. And I don't think we've ever seen anything quite like that. So when he calls the heads of state into the White House and he effectively uses them as a patsy to get off his jokes. Right. You see a Zelensky sitting there across from him, totally befuddled.

11:12Adam Aleksic:You're not acting at all thankful. And that's not a nice thing. I'll be honest. That's not a nice thing. All right. I think we've seen enough. What do you think? This is going to be great television. I will say that.

11:25Tressie McMillan Cottom:You can see about what is happening right now. And I thought, I think the only person who understands what's happening in this exchange would be someone who has produced a comedy show. He was using a politician on the global stage as a comedic foil for his jokes and playing that to the audience. So again, it's not that the humor is lighthearted and it's not that I enjoy that he is funny, but I can acknowledge that he's using humor for a political purpose. And I don't think we've ever seen humor used as a political speech act this way before.

11:58Adam Aleksic:I should also note that transgressive content generates more comments. It's people saying, oh, I like this, I don't like this, or responding to it or making riffs on it. All of those count as engagement on social media algorithms, which pushes messages further. Emotional content goes more viral. Things that draw your gaze, whether or not it's good or bad, social media algorithms don't show you what's good. They show you what can keep you hooked in as a viewer. And the same way you might turn your head to look at a traffic accident, you might keep watching when you're looking at the president of the United States talking to the president of Ukraine this way.

12:32Adam Aleksic:That's something you can't look away from. This metric of attention is actually the defining feature of what makes the video get attention. It's kind of circular. But Trump really does play into those things, knowingly or not. So if he changes the way that we communicate, does that mean that Trump has also changed the way that we think? I think so. I think this is about the reality we're building and constructing in our heads. What these algorithms and AI do fundamentally is there's an input, something crazy happens, we don't know what, it's called a black box, not even the engineers know what happens, and then there's an output.

13:12Adam Aleksic:There's a lot of opportunities for that output to be different than reality itself. It always will be, in fact, because the input is going to be kind of a map of the territory. It's never going to be the full picture. Ultimately, what we see is not reality. we are kind of trained to assume this is reality the algorithm is presented as like this is good there's like likes on the side of the video but the likes only reflect the engagement they don't reflect actual kind of human confirmation that we all do actually like this but you see that it's legitimized and then you construct this notion that it is good and you build your reality based on what you're seeing based on you think it's real there's a growing perception gap in the United States, for example, that we consistently are over and overestimating how extreme we think other people's political beliefs are.

14:01Adam Aleksic:And I think that's because algorithms are showing you a bimodal distribution of political beliefs. They're going to show you AOC and they're going to show you Marjorie Taylor Greene because those people are going to go more viral.

14:08Tressie McMillan Cottom:That is absolutely unacceptable. How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person? Are your feelings her words down? Oh, oh, girl, baby girl. Oh, really? Don't even play. Baby girl. I don't think

14:23Adam Aleksic:They're not going to show you my congressman from where I grew up, Albany, New York, Paul Tonko. I want to thank the gentleman for offering this common sense amendment. The reality is we have a lot of waste containing PFAS spread out all across the country. He's boring. I'm sorry. In the same way that the elite discourse is boring and Trump is exciting.

14:41Tressie McMillan Cottom:Yeah, bring back boring politicians, by the way. I'm in favor, Adam.

14:44Adam Aleksic:You're going to have to use a different medium. I don't think the medium of social media is disposed at all to reward boring. Tressie, you wrote a column in August that commented on Trump's fan of giving decrees via social media. So how are the platforms themselves shaping how his message kind of gets out?

15:00Tressie McMillan Cottom:So one of the things that I think Trump does very well, and I've even talked about how he is a meme, he is mimetic. That is his entire mode of engagement. And the way that he uses communication to shape reality, to make his policy seem inevitable, that is the stick and the carrot. honestly, in his political approach. So what he'll do, for example, is he'll get on Truth Social and he will issue a decree, you know, like a great king. And sometimes that is also partnered with an executive order, which I would argue is sort of like the bureaucratic cousin of the social media posts. You know, it has a questionable amount of enforcement, but what it does do is it resets the bounds of the discourse, of the conversation.

15:44Tressie McMillan Cottom:And so suddenly we're talking about an executive order is coming that is going to do X. Now, it may not be legal. Sometimes it's not even feasible. There's no bureaucratic means for something like what Donald Trump wants to happen to happen. But what he can do sometimes is he can use the pronouncement to shape people's understanding of what is possible and therefore probable. What he knows how to do is to shape our understanding of what is next and what is coming by saying it has already happened. So he forecloses on the possibilities of political, you know, all of the politics that goes into enacting some new policy change.

16:24Tressie McMillan Cottom:He is overextending the powers of the executive office, but mostly because he creates an audience for what he wants, and then the audience makes it real. This is Adam's point. We understand what is possible and what is happening by the language we have. And when he can so capture our language, how we now even talk about people, right, then he also owns what we think should happen next. And very often it aligns with what he wants to happen next. So I think he just uses it as a way to shape his politics. And the fact that we don't quite take that seriously actually just makes it more powerful.

17:00Adam Aleksic:Everything you say shifts the Overton window, the range of acceptable discourse in a society. The Overton window is just your idea of what other people think is okay for you to say. And you will not say things if it doesn't seem like it's okay to say. And the more you normalize a certain type of language, a certain type of rhetoric, a certain type of idea, the more people will talk about it. And because social media algorithms are amplifying extreme things, I think the Overton window is widening. I think there are more acceptable, crazy things to be said than there were in like 2008 or something.

17:31Tressie McMillan Cottom:Yeah, and I think that'll be Donald Trump's lasting legacy, by the way. I think he wants to institutionalize himself and memorialize himself. I actually think this presidency will be that he was able to do that.

17:40Adam Aleksic:There is a transient nature to our discourse, which is incredibly meme driven. These memes are ephemeral. They come and they go and you have to tap into the current culture moment. It's all very vibes forward and less factual based. It's very important to pay attention to the media scholar Harold Innes, who talked about time biased versus space biased communication. And space biased communication is stuff that fills up a lot of space immediately and can go very far. but doesn't stick around for a long time. And time-biased communication is like oral traditions, books, stuff that will stick around for longer, but fewer people are maybe going to read it.

18:11Adam Aleksic:And I think both of these have their own problems, right? Time-biased communication can be controlled by gatekeepers of how we're talking to each other. And space-biased communication is great for virally communicating, but it has that real problem that there is no cultural record. It is moment after moment, feeling after feeling. The way we engage with the internet is driven by these feelings that come and go rapidly. And the moment you pause, we've already moved on. And so that's why I just really strongly think we should be mixing our forms of media. I don't think we should be ignoring the algorithm.