Resisting Trump 2.0 with Brain-Rot Memes

Earlier this month, Tesla, the Elon Musk-led car company, staged a publicity stunt in front of the White House. A row of electric vehicles, including an angular stainless-steel Cybertruck, was arranged for Donald Trump to inspect before a fleet of news cameras. As far as photo opportunities go, it was absurd enough, turning the supposedly august Presidential residence into something resembling the set of a car-dealership commercial. (In its jarring clash of high-and-low symbolism, it recalled the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference that Rudy Giuliani hosted on Trump’s behalf after the 2020 election.) Trump, playing the role of the discerning shopper, stepped into a gleaming red Tesla Model S. Musk circled the car, ready to assist his faux client, and pointed out the brake and the accelerator. “It’s like driving a golf cart,” he said. Trump, presumably admiring the touch screen that the car has in lieu of buttons, exclaimed, “Wow! That’s beautiful. . . . Everything’s computer!”

The event was a transparent attempt to lift Tesla’s stock price, which has suffered recently in large part owing to mounting anti-Musk public sentiment. But it was Trump’s brief utterance that stole the show. He has always had a genius for contagious coinages—even, occasionally, when the language is accidental. (Remember “covfefe”?) “Everything’s computer,” with its compressed and fractured syntax, perfectly evokes the befuddling era we find ourselves in: technology is infiltrating every aspect of our lives—even, with Musk’s DOGE rampage, the workings of the federal government. Tesla is computer; artificial intelligence is computer; politics is computer. Am I computer, too? The phrase instantly became a meme, used to caption everything from clips of “The Matrix” and “Star Wars” to images of Kim Kardashian with a humanoid Tesla robot with which she has lately been staging scenes.

The phrase is enthusiastic yet ambivalent. It can be uttered in delight or in fear. Above all, it expresses a kind of bemusement at the tumultuous unknowability of our moment, and in that respect it has something in common with other memes that have gained traction in the first months of the second Trump Administration. As I observed in a column last year, the 2024 election was characterized online by its brain-rot memes, nonsensical collisions of imagery that produced a lot of noise but little coherent impact. (See, for instance: Kamala Harris and brat summer.) Now the brain rot persists, but the underlying subject matter is more dire. We participate in the memes to express our anxiety that whatever is coming next might be even more chaotic than what is already happening.

Another recent example: “Trump took egg. Egg gone.” That phrase is the work of Michael Sweeney, a video editor in San Diego who sometimes directs Democratic political ads. He’d been to his local Costco, where shoppers were maxing out a store-mandated allotment of eggs: two packages of sixty eggs apiece. Sweeney grabbed one of the last eggs on the shelves and, on February 4th, reposted a picture of bare shelves to the social network Bluesky with the caption in question, which quickly took on a life of its own. Sweeney told me recently, “Unlike a lot of problems in the government that Trump’s incompetence is causing, this one is very easy to point out and self-evidently a problem even to people who don’t pay attention to politics.” The phrase morphed into “Trump Take Egg” and then became a memetic rallying cry across social media, labelling more photos of empty shelves and graphs of rising egg prices. A taqueria in Virginia used it as an excuse for a buy-one-get-one-free deal on breakfast tacos: “Trump take egg. Brazos give egg.”

Democrats have struggled to craft any sort of effective message of opposition to the second Trump Administration. One recent round of video clips featuring the speeches of Democratic senators was roundly mocked for repeating tired talking points. In the absence of anything more galvanizing, the formula “Trump Take _____”—fill in the blank with “egg,” “cancer research,” or “Social Security”—is, as Sweeney put it, “sort of self-consciously stupid but at least feels like you’re landing a punch.” Another favorite target of late is Vice-President J. D. Vance. Vance hadn’t made much of an impression in the new Administration until he helped Trump berate the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, last month in a televised meeting from the Oval Office. Vance sat on a couch, looking something like a petulant child, before practically leaping out of his seat to demand Zelensky “say thank you.” It was Vance’s first breakout public moment as Vice-President, and the meme machine went to work: Vance as Humpty Dumpty; Vance as a toddler with a propeller hat and a lollipop; Vance as a hippie troubadour with a neckbeard and a mop of curly hair. The more bizarre—Vance as the center of a nuclear-bomb explosion—the more apt.

A version of the same Vance meme first took hold last October when the Republican congressman Mike Collins posted an image of Vance that had been heavily edited (“yassified,” in internet slang) to have stronger cheekbones and a more angular jawline. Collins, for unexplained reasons, had turned Vance into a “Chad,” an online archetype of bro-y masculinity. Then a Los Angeles-based creative named Dave McNamee posted an altered portrait of a chubby-faced Vance, promising, “For every 100 likes I will turn JD Vance into a progressively apple cheeked baby.” He went on to create a feminine Vance, an elderly Vance, a Justin Bieber-ish Vance. Collins’s original post, McNamee told me, “revealed a deep insecurity that the right has about J. D. Vance—that he is not the masculine icon they want to prop up.”

Liam Grey, the Canadian administrator of various Instagram meme accounts, including one called @dailyvance, for which he collects memes of Vance’s face, compared the Vice-President to “a modern-day Harambe,” referring to the gorilla that was shot and killed, in 2016, when a human child fell into his zoo enclosure. On social media, people photoshopped Harambe into every imaginable scenario, less out of any animal-rights sentiment than as an early expression of online brain rot, the pursuit of viral content for its own sake: the more meaningless the better. The profusion of memes turned Harambe into a sort of internet folk hero, but Vance is no innocent zoo animal; the images of the Vice-President function more like voodoo dolls, casting vengeful spells from afar.

Zach Silberberg, a digital producer in Manhattan who, last July, created a much-shared meme of Vance with slightly shrunken features, interpreted the popularity of Vance memes as a sign of “people feeling powerless.” The new Administration is dismantling the federal government, allying itself with strongmen, and implementing a new McCarthyism. The Vance memes transmute terror into mockery: as Silberberg put it, “This man has an unprecedented amount of access to power. I’m gonna ruin his day just a little bit.” Earlier this month, the journalist Julio Rosas reported that Vance has seen the memes and “thinks it’s a funny trend.” A few days later, the Vice-President himself posted a Vance meme to his account on X, an edit of his face onto Leonardo DiCaprio’s frame in a scene from the film “Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood,” in which DiCaprio’s character, an actor, points at a television screen in recognition. In today’s political ecosystem, any form of internet notoriety might be desirable.

It’s one thing when political memes are brain-rotted; it’s another when the practice of politics itself seems to be. This week, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote about being added by mistake to a Signal group chat, titled Houthi PC small group, in which national-security leaders—apparently including Vance; the national-security adviser, Mike Waltz; the deputy White House chief of staff; and the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, among others—were planning an attack against the Houthis in Yemen. (The White House press secretary denied that war plans were discussed in the chat.) Waltz celebrated the operation’s launch with a fluent string of emojis: 👊🇺🇸🔥. In a display of gallows humor at the sloppiness of the leaders’ theoretically clandestine communication, people online quickly turned those symbols into memes, and renamed their own chats Houthi PC small group. Making war is computer, too. ♦