P8 NY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2019
ent personality traits. Perhaps a candidate’s success,
as a center of such content, relies less on what people
are saying than how much they’re talking.
Take, say, the current president. When Trump
won the 2016 election, his online supporters liked to
say that they memed him into the White House. All of
their semi-ironic internet boosterism had sincerely
paid off.
And this was not as unexpected a tactic as it
seemed. Wider forces in American culture had been
psychically Photoshopping Trump into the presidency
for decades. He’d long been cast as a kind of novelty
president: a totally ridiculous, not-realistic option, but
an option nonetheless. Now those two, seemingly
opposed roles — the fake president, and the real one —
have aligned.
Perhaps it all began in 1988, when Spy magazine
ran an article called “Nation to Trump: We Need You”
and reported, “We have come to believe that a Donald
Trump candidacy is viable.” That was meant to be a
joke, but didn’t Trump’s critics treat his actual cam-
paign like a joke, all the way until he seriously won?
Long before Trump’s presidency was a reality, it was,
for Spy, a dumb idea. Yet it was an idea: To be parodied
as president, he had to be in some way plausible as
president.
The magazine commissioned a multiple-choice
poll asking, “Who are you most disappointed isn’t run-
ning for president?” It slipped in the name of one of its
favorite objects of mockery. And it took the result — 4
percent wished he was running — as an opportunity to
knock him again: “Look at these impressive figures
Trump can build on (and how he can build!).” Twenty-
eight years later, he finished the job.
For decades, it was liberals who recognized
Trump’s presidential possibility. In April 2004, a web-
site appeared called TrumpFiresBush.com. On it was
a mash-up video featuring footage of President
George W. Bush spliced with scenes from “The
Apprentice,” a reality show that had debuted that Jan-
uary, so that Trump appeared to “fire” the president.
The website was produced by an online activist
group called TrueMajorityACTION, founded by Ben
Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s, and it used the Trump meme to
spur liberals into political action. As the video put it:
“We’ll fire Bush together, and have some fun along the
way.”
In his 2006 book, “Convergence Culture,” Henry
Jenkins cited the video and asked: “Who would have
imagined that Donald Trump could emerge as a popu-
list spokesman, or that sympathetic images of corpo-
rate control could fuel a movement to reclaim democ-
racy?” Who indeed!
But we kept telling and retelling the same joke. In
2011, Trump sat at the White House Correspondents’
Association dinner, a guest of The Washington Post, as
the host, Seth Meyers, riffed: “Donald Trump has
been saying he will run for president as a Republican
— which is surprising, since I just assumed he was
running as a joke.” And in January of 2015, even as
Trump weighed a run for the real presidency, he was
mulling a role as the fake president in the SyFy origi-
nal movie “Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!”
Trump is often referred to as our “reality TV presi-
dent,” but that obscures all the other ways he has
leveraged his brand: His inherited wealth was
extended into real estate holdings, Wrestlemania tie-
ins, books, golf, steak. He is, really, our president of
branding, and his success in politics hinged on his abil-
ity to extend that brand into one more avenue — the
internet — where the ironic absurdity of his persona
became an unexpected asset. Playing the roles of both
jester and king, he thrives on channeling the power of
the presidency and undermining it at once.
It was once assumed that humor could be sharp-
ened into a weapon against the powerful, but Trump’s
presidency calls that into question. What if joking
about Trump in the White House actually had the
effect of drawing him closer to it? What if it helped to
defang the notion — to gradually introduce it into pos-
sibility? Today, Trump is our novelty president, and
our real one, too.
AT AN APRILtown hall in Des Moines, Pete Buttigieg picked a song to repre-
sent how he thinks “we should come to politics”: Everlast’s “What It’s Like.”
The song, which topped the mainstream rock chart in 1998, prescribes
empathy in the face of various social ills: homelessness, teen pregnancy,
drug addiction. It is also an acoustic rap-lite number full of stereotypical
observations. “We’ve all seen a man at the liquor store beggin’ for your
change,” Everlast sings. “The hair on his face is dirty, dreadlocked and full
of mange.” He goes on: “God forbid you ever had to walk a mile in his shoes,
’cause then you really might know what it’s like to sing the blues.”
The answer inspired this Twitter exchange:@Bro_Pair: This just might be the most embarrassing person to
ever run for office@angelabdreaming: The song is about putting yourself in other’s
shoes, emphasizing with their struggles and pain. That’s a fantas-
tic way to “come to politics.”@vgman20: Yeah but it suuuuuuucksDo Buttigieg’s critics distrust him because they don’t like “What It’s
Like”? Not exactly. But the song becomes an emblem of their distrust. Its
sound is a musical transliteration of what they see as Buttigieg’s centrist
vibe.
If Everlast — the former House of Pain frontman who got big with
“Jump Around” — took rap music and transformed it into easy listening for
white audiences, they see Buttigieg as taking progressive ideas and render-
ing them into technocratic, focus-grouped policy tweaks. “Progressive” is a
political ideology but also a synonym for the artistic avant-garde. While a
candidate like Beto O’Rourke labors to exploit that connotation by auspi-
ciously aligning himself with punk, Buttigieg is unapologetically the adult
contemporary candidate.CASE STUDY
A Twitter exchange about the singer Everlast reveals
how pop-culture aesthetics carry real values.PETE BUTTIGIEG’S
MIXTAPE
SUUUUUUUCKS
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Twitter •fig. 8, fig. 9: via Giphy •fig. 10:via Twitter •fig. 11: Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton: Protect and Defend Your Candidate by Nancy
Stack-Colgan •fig. 12:via Facebook •fig. 13, fig. 14:The Onion •fig. 15: Marianne Williamson’s Dank Meme Stash via Facebook •fig. 16, fig 17:
Daily Trump Memes via Facebook •fig. 18:via Facebook •fig. 19:orbgang.love •fig. 20: via Instagram •fig. 21:via Twitter •fig. 22:The RBG
Workout: How She Stays Strong... and You Can Too! by Bryant Johnson •fig. 23:via Giphy
Print Design:Tala Safié and Andrew
Sondern •Editor:Lorne Manly •
Special Thanks:Josh Barone, Fred
Bierman, Alicia DeSantis, Susanna
Timmons, and Art ProductionFrom the January/
February 1988 issue
of Spy magazine.
In the poll, Trump
“fared increasingly well
at decreasing levels of
voter income.”