Trump: the Memes and the Man

I’m fascinated by the visual language and cliches of Conservative memes because they say so much about the world we live in and how Trump cultists see themselves and their opposition, albeit not in the manner intended. 

In these memes rigid gender roles make a triumphant comeback as the cornerstones of Western Christian American supremacy, to be protected to the death in the face of the rampaging, corrosive forces of Islam-loving political correctness.

To be a man is to be tough, stoic, unemotional, ruled by emotion and logic like the great android-philosopher Gods Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.

Men are represented by archetypes of conventional masculinity. The soldier is deified as the realest of real men, a patriotic hero willing to risk death for shitty pay so that Millennial snowflakes can crawl into their safe spaces for their Vegan Cupcake Pillow Parties for Bernie Sanders. The cop is similarly romanticized as an icon of rugged masculinity who selflessly keeps the world safe while being crucified as the enemy of mankind by a hate-crazed, criminal loving left. 

Poor Sam Elliott has been roped into duty as a meme fixture because the majestically mustachioed cowboy represents another hokey old school fixture of American masculinity. Let me tell you something, pardner, the gruff, sonorous voice of commonsense wisdom embodied by Sam Elliott does NOT have time for political correctness or trigger warnings or gluten-free hyper-“wokeness.” 

Women, meanwhile, are weak and ruled by their emotions, most specifically their incoherent rage towards Donald Trump and his followers and his incredible record of successes, to the point that they point and glare at men, their wild, manic eyes alight with man-hating fury, pure hatred emanating from every pore. 

Right wing memes are obsessed with AOC because she is popular and famous and charismatic and a huge rising star in American politics but also because from various angles and for various reasons she can look angry to the point of rage because she is angry about all the right things and as a politician and activist it’s her job and moral obligation to be righteously angry and then act out of that anger. 

For men, this kind of impassioned anger is often seen as a sign of strength or passion, or authenticity. For women, however, it’s vilified and mocked as craziness, as unprofessionalism, as an embarrassing inability to control emotions. 

The “Crazy-Eyed” Woman is consequently a ubiquitous fixture in right wing memes, if not a dominant figure. Greta Thunberg rose to an unfortunate fame as an instant staple of right wing memes because famous photographs of her giving her impassioned speech at the United Nations or staring down Trump fit all too neatly into this narrative of women being mentally ill, unhinged, overly emotional, weak creatures, as evidenced by the face that sometimes they look angry in photographs. 

Do you ever see Melania Trump or Ivanka Trump looking angry in photographs? Do you ever see them expressing any emotion at all? No, they just look impeccable and feminine to an almost parodic degree, and consequently qualify as perfect women. 

If Progressive women in these memes are angry and out of control in ways traditionally coded as masculine men are perceived as weak and feminine, effete, weeping figures in androgynous clothing that does not fit them, weeping about the existence of Confederate statues or the existence of Milo Yiannapoulous at an age their grandads were all punching Hitler, slam-dunking basketballs and making sweet love to a young Marilyn Monroe. 

The great irony, of course, is that these memes exist to glorify Trump and his cult of personality yet Trump embodies not the manly, conventional virtues of stoicism, toughness and confident leadership extolled by these memes but rather the reflexive rage, incoherent anger and complete and total inability to control his emotions or the way he expresses them that these ugly little online eyesores angrily insist are the exclusive domain of those crazy-eyed, castrating  shrews on the left, your AOCs and Greta Thunbergs and Nancy Pelosis. 

For all his make-pretend toughness and mafia don mock-machismo, Trump is a hot mess and a raging drama queen who is never more than a perceived slight away from a total public meltdown. He’s moody and weak, ruled by emotions he cannot control or understand. Trump would like to think he’s Wolverine or Dirty Harry. He’s more analogous to one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. 

Yet in these memes and in Ben Garrison’s cartoons and John McNaughton’s paintings the messiest, most drama-prone bitch in the history of the American presidency has been magically transformed into a rugged action hero chuckling confidently as he thinks and maneuvers circles around his baffled and defeated opponents, who simply cannot understand how he just keeps winning in the face of overwhelming opposition from Democrats and press. 

I suspect part of the reason the “Grab em by the pussy” leak didn’t kill Trump’s campaign or cause him to drop out is because its grubby, gross caveman masculinity, its profane, regressive, “Me see sexy woman, me take her back to cave” vibe appealed, perversely, to creeps who would also love to be able to say crude, disgusting, misanthropic things about women and their bodies as mere “locker room talk”, the kind everyone engages in and consequently no one can judge, and get away with it. 

But rather than acknowledge that, personality-wise, Trump is everything they accuse progressives of being, these memes continue to project the president’s rampaging faults and myriad inadequacies onto his political nemeses.

Yes, these memes have an awful lot to tell us, mostly about how Trump fans yearn desperately for a return to the days of stoic, manly, strong men and demure women but are willing to make an enormous exception for Trump himself. 

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