Triumph of the Pro-Trump Meme

The outrage du jour from Team Trump: a video edit of a scene from the 2014 movie Kingsmen: The Secret Service. In the original movie, Colin Firth's heroic character is basically mind-controlled into attacking a church full of innocents who have in turn been mind-controlled to kill him. He slaughters them in gory, stylized choreography. In the video edit, Trump's face is cut-and-pasted over Firth's, and the folk Firth is shooting, stabbing, and otherwise massacring wear the faces of Trump's enemies: the Clintons, Obama, John McCain (?), and various network logos (NPR, ABC, CNN, etc.).

I'll not link to the video here. For one thing, it's distasteful and depressing. A joke about mass-shooting? No thanks. For the record, I had a similarly queasy feeling watching Kingsmen in the theatre--graphic violence wrapped in stylized irony and served with vapidly elitist anti-elitism. I doubt the edit improves on the original.

But the bigger reason not to post here is because the video is a trollish basilisk. To re-post it or contribute to its spread and view count only spreads its curse.

The New York Times broke the story late this weekend, reporting that the video was shown at a Florida Pro-Trump conference (by the group American Priority) as part of a larger panel (display?) about memes. News of it rolled across the mediasphere this morning, sparking mostly alarm and anger from the left (and the media) and mostly whataboutism from the right.

As The Washington Post follow up reported, the video, attributed to a pro-Trump meme group called TheGeekzTeam, had been posted on YouTube for a year. Accounts and pictures of the conference suggest that the video was on a small TV in a mostly empty room on loop. Not many people would have seen the edit but for the Times story going viral. 

Now practically everyone scrolling through news sites has seen it.

This is a coup for TheGeekzTeam and other pro-Trump meme artists like CarpeDonktum, whose videos attacking Democrats Trump has re-tweeted without context in the past. Their view counts have skyrocketed. That most views come from folk opposed to their message matters little. Trolls don't feed on adulation, only attention. Outraged attention is just as tasty as cheer-leading attention. I'm sure there are countless other videos by Donktum et al. just waiting for intrepid reporters to signal-boost their message to the masses.

Meme warfare has been a huge part of Team Trump's media machine. They've taken "memetics" seriously, devising workshops, contests, and showcases to produce and disseminate anti-left and pro-Trump memes. Donktum garnered popularity initially by winning a meme contest, a feat that earned him an invitation to the White House's recent "social media summit." Trump himself, whether through canny strategy or dim narcissism, regularly proves himself master of this attention economy. His tweets become memes spreading across the net, the cyber equivalent of "no such thing as bad publicity." He remains the center of the narrative, the object of everyone's attention.

I'm weary just writing about it. That weariness is part of the point. Trump and Trump meme outrage panics burn off our reservoirs of attention. A lot of Trump's impeachment inquiry strategy just involves counting on the public's energy to flag, for the show to become boring. 

I don't know how we go back to any kind of normal.

Skip forward five years. Regardless of whether this whole impeachment moment ends with Trump leaving or Trump triumphant, in five years there's someone else. What do they do? How does anyone govern after the anomaly of Trump?

Even 50% less wild tweeting from a POTUS would still mean an unending stream of outrage fuel for the side not in power. Already, it seems to me, Trump's penchant for attention over stability is damaging us. Our only reaction to it, from the left, seems to have the unfortunate side effect of feeding the troll.

Guh. Just guh.

JF