← The Opinions
The Opinions
Trump Is America’s First Meme President
00:27:28
How Trump has made his mark in politics and in our minds.
Loading summary
Transcript55 lines
- [00:01]
Neeraj
Hi, I'm Neeraj from Madison, Wisconsin. I would like to share my subscription for NY Times with my family members. I should be able to share recipes from nyt, cooking, wire cutter articles or athletic articles. We are a family of four. I would like them to have access to the subscription too.
- [00:19]
Tressie Macmillan Cotton
Thank you. Neeraj, we heard you introducing the New York Times Family subscription. One subscription, up to four separate logins for anyone in your life. Find out more@nytimes.com family.
- [00:34]
Podcast Host
This is the Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.
- [00:50]
Meher Ahmad
My 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 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 Alexik, the author of Algo How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language. He recently wrote an essay on the topic 4 times opinion and opinion columnist Tressie Macmillan Cotton, a sociologist who is a keen observer of the intersection of culture and politics. Adam Tressy, welcome.
- [01:27]
Adam Alexik
Hi.
- [01:27]
Tressie Macmillan Cotton
It's a real pleasure.
- [01:30]
Meher Ahmad
So before we jump into the finer points of Trump and language, I wanted to ask each of you when you first notice 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. Tressy, when was that moment for you?
- [01:52]
Tressie Macmillan Cotton
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. 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.
- [02:38]
Adam Alexik
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, so you're constantly generating more news. And he was very effective at communicating in a way where he would show up way more on the news than any other candidate in the 2016 primary. So I think that was the first time I started thinking about that.
- [03:28]
Meher Ahmad
Mm. 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?
- [03:45]
Adam Alexik
Yeah, many people are saying this.
- [03:47]
Donald Trump
So many people are saying, you've got to run again. They love the job we do. A lot of people are saying, maybe.
- [03:52]
Adam Alexik
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.
- [04:05]
Donald Trump
Oh, fake news. Cnn. Oh, yeah, yeah, here we go. A great wall. And nobody builds walls better than me.
- [04:11]
Adam Alexik
Believe me, 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 XY 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.
- [04:38]
Meher Ahmad
And what is it about those specific words or phrases that, like, resonates and is able to penetrate so deeply into our culture?
- [04:45]
Adam Alexik
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. 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 haha 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. In fact, that could be quite good for him in this day and age.
- [05:56]
Meher Ahmad
Trustee, is there any Trumpisms that stand out to you as particularly interesting?
- [06:01]
Tressie Macmillan Cotton
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 that 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. 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. 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 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. Yeah.
- [07:46]
Adam Alexik
There is something so important to comedy. You look at what these algorithms are doing. For this second election where he got reelected, the 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.
- [08:14]
Tressie Macmillan Cotton
I'm sorry, that one hurts Adam.
- [08:18]
Meher Ahmad
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. A 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. Trustee, do you, do you feel that way also? Do you think he's funny?
- [09:23]
Tressie Macmillan Cotton
Yes. I probably think Donald Trump is funniest when he is not trying to be funny. His actual attempts at jokes are, I actually 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 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. 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 affective desire of extreme emotions. And cruel humor also feels a little transgressive to people especially I think, if they. That the culture had moved so far towards 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. 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.
- [11:15]
Donald Trump
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, huh? This is going to be great television. I will say that you can see.
- [11:29]
Tressie Macmillan Cotton
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.
- [12:01]
Adam Alexik
I should also note that transgressive content generates more comments. 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. In the same way you might, like, turn your head to look at a traffic accident, keep watching. When you're looking at the, you know, President of the United States talking to the president of Ukraine this way, 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.
- [12:49]
Meher Ahmad
Mm. Mm. So if he changes the way that we communicate, does that mean that Trump has also changed the way that we think?
- [12:58]
Adam Alexik
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. 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 examp, that we consistently are over and overestimating how extreme we think other people's political beliefs are. 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.
- [14:11]
Tressie Macmillan Cotton
That is absolutely unacceptable. How dare you? Appearance of another person. Are your feelings hurt? Her words down. Oh, oh, girl. Baby girl. Oh, really? Don't even play baby girl. I don't think we are going to move.
- [14:27]
Adam Alexik
They're not going to show you my congressman from where I grew up, Albany, New York, Paul Tonko.
- [14:30]
Tressie Macmillan Cotton
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.
- [14:38]
Adam Alexik
He's boring. I'm sorry. In the same way that the lead discourse is boring and Trump is exciting.
- [14:43]
Tressie Macmillan Cotton
Yeah. Bring back boring politicians. By the way, I'm in favor.
- [14:47]
Adam Alexik
Adam, 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 trustee.
- [14:54]
Meher Ahmad
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?
- [15:03]
Tressie Macmillan Cotton
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 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 post. It has a questionable amount of enforcement, but what it does do is it resets the bounds of the discourse of the conversation. 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 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. 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.
- [17:02]
Adam Alexik
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.
- [17:33]
Tressie Macmillan Cotton
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.
- [17:43]
Adam Alexik
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 bias 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. And I think both of these have their own problems. Right. Time biased communication can be controlled by gatekeepers of of how we're talking to each other. And space bias 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. I think this is where a lot of culture is emanating from right now. And I don't like the reaction of completely going off phones because then you just leave behind that part of our society right now. I think we should be mixing these forms of media. I think we should be maintaining an institutional historical record through time biased communication and at the same time communicating broadly subversively harnessing these tools for space biased communication.
- [19:14]
Meher Ahmad
So we kind of touched on this that like the Trump of it all and his particular ability to navigate these various platforms and modes of communication. We touched a little bit, I think, maybe not mention explicitly the degree to which the left, the Democratic Party struggles to do the same thing. But there's one kind of like prominent example that's coming out as a foil of this, which is the New York City mayoral candidate Zoran Mamdani. And he's kind of cut through a lot of the discourse with a really similar ease in navigating various platforms. He's kind of rode various waves of virality, has created memes of his own. So I'm curious what you guys make of him in the context of this conversation. Tressy?
- [19:57]
Tressie Macmillan Cotton
Yeah, this is fascinating because I think we attribute a lot of these distinctions to generational differences. Right? Oh, well, he's, you know, Mamdani is sort of born of the media and I think there is a lot to that. But I always like to say people, Donald Trump was not. Donald Trump is a boomer and he has an extreme amount of facility with these media contexts. So I don't think that it is entirely generational differences. I would actually say Mamdani reminds me more of an iteration of Obama in the sense that he has an extreme amount of appreciation for the communication tools. But my sense is that he is merging sort of the bureaucratic forms. He still has political speech writers, he still has media makers who are taking what I suspect is his natural facility for these modes of communication and sort of fitting it into a hybrid of today's new politician. And I am sorry to say this, I do not think that that is the same thing as what Donald Trump does, which is he iterates the medium itself. He is changing the Internet and becoming and channeling the Internet in a way that I'm not sure that Mamdani does. I think Mamdani is very good at using those tools to cut through, as you point out, to people who are not deeply embedded in Internet cultures. Right. Who do not know the many layered contextual histories of things that go viral. And he's sort of a shortcut for a lot of those people. He's using social media context in a way that I think feel safer and more familiar to those of us who do not spend a lot of our time on the dark web with edgelords. Right.
- [21:30]
Adam Alexik
I'm completely with Tressy on this. I think if you want the closest example to Donald Trump on the left, it would be Gavin Newsom, who's directly imitating Donald Trump.
- [21:37]
Tressie Macmillan Cotton
That's what I was thinking.
- [21:39]
Adam Alexik
He's embodying the medium. Mamdani. If you actually look at his, what he says in his messaging, he does not use slang words. He does not use Internet memes. However, he does adopt the visual semiotic language of how you communicate on these platforms. He emerges from water dripping wet to talk about rent freezes. And this is a visual hook which the users of social media will recognize as the kind of start of a viral video. They are socially conditioned into continuing to watch this video because we have an expectation of the kind of video we're going to watch. And he plays into those very well. He has aesthetics, he has graphics, motion graphics that work very well. But his, his, Mamdani actually, I think, is under a lot of pressure to sound like a regular politician, to use formal language. And he, he wears that suit. He presents like a very articulate, very educated person. Not playing into the memes because that would be very bad for his brand as, like a young brown man.
- [22:34]
Tressie Macmillan Cotton
Can I just say real quick, Adam, the idea of how the other politicians are mirroring Trump is, I think, one of the more fascinating ones because you see it on the left and right, and you also. I find it fascinating how many of them try and then fail because they have so much ego going in about, oh, he's not smart. This is so easy. And it's actually not. It is its own facility with language. And I think it's fascinating to watch politicians try to capture it. And to your point, I think Gavin Newsom so far is the only one who gets it.
- [23:02]
Meher Ahmad
Trustee, what do you think about Gavin Newsom? Is the reason why it's hitting for him and not for others?
- [23:07]
Tressie Macmillan Cotton
That's a great question. There's so much shaping of politicians, like you pointed out earlier. The same with any public figure, celebrities, you know, and the like, that it is very difficult to break out of that self awareness. And one of the things that Donald Trump has is he has no self awareness. Right. That's why he feels authentic to so many people. He seems not to have any awareness of how people are receiving him, only that they respond to him. And I believe that Gavin Newsom has the same thing, that while he had been very politically sculpted, he is certainly in the mode of a traditional politician. What he is demonstrating is that he perhaps has less. Less self awareness, less self seriousness, to constrain how willing he is to sort of jump into these linguistic waters. It also might help that he is doing it as Offense and not playing defense. Right. He isn't having to defend his political office. He isn't having to. To the point Adam made about Mamdani. He isn't having to conform to, you know, stereotypes and archetypes about race or gender, et cetera. And so he also has the same amount of sort of like embodied privilege that Donald Trump has. You get a str white man who looks like a politician to Americans, and he has got some room to play around with being less self aware than I think other politicians can.
- [24:28]
Adam Alexik
I'm going to push back on the less self aware thing. I think Newsom's speech works because it fits into the aesthetic of trolling. And it is still. It still works because the all caps is memetically fit for the medium. But the reason people find it funny and the reason it works is because he's seen as constantly, subversively, almost absurdly making fun of someone in a style that has been popular on the Internet since the early days of 4chan.
- [24:58]
Tressie Macmillan Cotton
Yeah, he's trolling.
- [24:59]
Meher Ahmad
It's interesting if I was to imagine, you know, like 200 years from now and someone blows the dust off of a Trump tweet. We can always tell it's a Trump tweet. The combination of words, his syntax is so unique. And I don't think that's true of Imam Donnie or even of an Obama, where if you were to read that statement just on its own, that you'd say, I know exactly who wrote this. Which I think is true of almost everything that Trump puts out there.
- [25:22]
Tressie Macmillan Cotton
You know, as a writer and one who appreciates the craft of writing, I think I always had to appreciate that Donald Trump has voice. Right. And voice is not something that you can necessarily train people to have. Certainly training can help. But whether you love it or hate it, Donald Trump's voice is distinctive. And to your point, you cannot misidentify it. In many ways, Donald Trump, I think, will end up being bigger than the American presidency. How much he transforms it in perpetuity remains to be seen. But I think he will have been larger than the presidency. And this part is the stunning part, is somebody who's always believed in the theories of communication and certainly believes in the theories that language shapes the world, seeing it play out in real time and seeing how much language opens up both modes of possibility and then forecloses on other modes of possibility, seeing that willed it with the executive office of powerful country on earth is beyond anything I could have imagined possible just 10 short years ago. That is distinctive and unique to Donald Trump. Love him or hate him, he's got voice. And as it turns out, voice is really, really important.
- [26:36]
Meher Ahmad
Well, Adam Tressy, this has been a really, really interesting conversation. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.
- [26:42]
Adam Alexik
Of course.
- [26:42]
Tressie Macmillan Cotton
It was a real pleasure.
- [27:02]
Podcast Host
If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Vishaka Darba, Christina Samulewski, and Gillian Weinberg. It's edited by Kari Pitkin and Alison Bruzick. Engineering, mixing and original music by Isaac Jones, sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabaro, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Aman Sahota. The Fact Check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuluski. The director of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.