Trump’s Trojan Horse: Using Memes to Disseminate Information

President Donald Trump is no stranger to posting memes. Most recently, he seemed to be trolling Democrats with AI-generated images riffing on the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now” and the polarizing American Eagle ad campaign, inserting himself as the crazy Colonel Bill Kilgore and the provocatively posed Sydeny Sweeney, respectively. 

Memes have been on his radar and a part of his broader strategy since 2015 — prior to his first presidency.

It wasn’t long after Trump announced his first presidential campaign when he started to associate himself with meme culture. As early as the summer 2015, the Trump campaign team was keeping a close eye on Trump pop culture buzz and sites like 4chan — an anonymous internet forum — trawling for content that could boost the clout of the campaign. 

This would come to be known online as the “Great Meme War,” a battle for the young, white male voting block. Many who have analyzed this campaign claim the use of memes to win over this group was a decisive factor in Trump’s 2016 victory over then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The online “Meme War” was largely fought by individual accounts which would post pro-Trump content en masse on platforms like X, formerly known as Twitter, at pivotal moments in the campaigns. 

These accounts would post about the “#trumptrain” and Pepe the Frog — a meme closely related to alt-right communities — to associate Trump with a younger, edgier audience.

But now, in 2025, things are different. While Trump used memes in his first term to capture and retain an untapped source of political support, his second term has leveraged memes as a powerful propaganda tool against the American public and in doing so shifted the American cultural sphere further right.

Since Trump’s return to the presidency, social media accounts associated with the Trump administration have been pumping out memes aimed at a broader audience than the professional political sphere. 

These posts range between the Department of Homeland Security tweeting a soyjack’s vs a chad’s reaction to an ICE arrest — the former appearing horrified, the latter delighted — and the White House official instagram posting an AI-generated hispanic “deported edition” Labubu with the caption, “WTF. Maybe Labubus are demonic.”

These are shocking posts coming from government accounts, but the shock value is what makes them so powerful.

The posts are intentionally edgy, pushing the envelope on topics in ways many would deem distasteful. This tactic is straight from the alt-right playbook. 

A 2024 publication by the Dutch government’s counterterrorism arm, NCCS, showed most memes which come out of the far-right are only considered “borderline content,” meaning it is hard for social media companies to regulate these types of posts.

Not only does hiding in the grey area allow these posts to remain online, but it also generates a veil of irony for Trump’s administration to hide behind when pushing a boundary too fast.

Take the “Chipocalypse Now” post from Trump’s TruthSocial account for example. Facing swift backlash from this post, border czar Mike Homan scurried to tell CBS they were taking Trump’s words “out of context,” insinuating Democrats were taking a joke too seriously.

Regardless of whether the post was meant in earnest or not, the effect was the same. As an ISD global report shows, such repeated exposure to “increasingly malign content concealed as ironic parody” will cement alt-right ideologies into America’s collective social consciousness. 

In other words, what’s inflammatory today becomes normal tomorrow, and the cycle repeats.

Since 2020, America has shifted dramatically rightward, thanks in no small part to the contributions of Trump’s social media endeavors. 

Billy McLaughlin, Trump’s director of digital content, stated this clearly in his guest essay for Fox News titled, “I Made Memes for the White House.” He writes the administration’s meme-focused content strategy “was a frontline tool for shaping narratives” and changing the way Americans see fundamental issues.

And so far, it’s worked. Since January, the Trump administration’s social media platforms have gained more than 16 million new followers — a majority of which are coming from younger Americans aged 18-34. These figures are a clear indication of how effective this strategy has been at radicalizing the American public, in particular the youth, toward alt-right ideologies.

These trends are alarming, and it would be foolish to suggest the American public is equipped to face this new socio-political threat. As the country grows more politically polarized by the day, pushing against this rightward thrust could prove just as explosive as ceding to it.

So, how do we untie this knot? Given the unprecedented nature of the dilemma, there is little consensus on what the path forward will look like. Now more than ever, Americans need to think critically about the content that they are consuming on social media — especially if the post seems inconspicuous at first. 

In 2025, memes are no longer just jokes. They have become Trojan horses.