When the history of 21st-century politics is
written, we’ll have to admit that one side understood the internet — and the other never really did.
In the Trump era, politics is less a contest of ideas than a battle of memes.
As the New York Times recently reported, the new White House doesn’t just post policy updates; it floods social feeds with A.I.-generated images, trollish videos, and a
constant barrage of mockery. Homeland Security has shared Pokémon-style deportation parodies. The Federal Communications Commission has used “The Office” GIFs to gloat over a
comedian’s suspension. The FBI director has traded emojis with MAGA influencers.
It’s all part of a coordinated communication strategy — one that’s fast, funny, cruel
and viral. The Dilley Meme Team, a network of online loyalists profiled by the Times, summed up its method bluntly: “It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to go
viral.” That line captures the new political physics: virality beats veracity.
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The Trump Internet State
According to the Times, Trump’s
second administration has institutionalized trolling as governance. Every post, meme, and video is designed to provoke outrage, flood the zone, and redefine what counts as normal political discourse.
For Trump's supporters, this performative combat isn’t just entertainment — it’s identity. Attention is power, and outrage is fuel.
Media scholar Whitney Phillips told
the Times that “trolling the libs has proven to be more politically, culturally, and economically successful than not trolling the libs.” Researchers like Jonathan
Nagler at N.Y.U. and Shannon McGregor at the University of North Carolina described the Trump team as “an administration of reply guys,” turning government itself into a meme factory.
Why Democrats Keep Losing Online
Democrats, by contrast, still approach social media like a press release. Even when they “go online,” it feels staged,
sanitized and slow. Senator Chuck Schumer recently admitted, in comments cited by the Times, that “we didn’t do enough of [social media] in the past,” which sounded
more like surrender than insight.
There are bright spots — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez using Instagram Live like a modern fireside chat, Gavin Newsom turning MAGA memes back on themselves
— but the Times noted that the party’s broader culture remains risk-averse and text-heavy. They talk to the feed; Trumpworld plays the feed.
The right understands that memes aren’t decoration — they’re weapons. Each one sets emotional terms before facts can catch up. Democrats still think the message matters most. The
other side knows the medium is the message.
The New Gatekeepers
For years, Democrats comforted themselves with the idea that social-media platforms
were neutral spaces — messy, yes, but fundamentally open. That illusion is gone.
Elon Musk’s X is not a public square; it’s a privately owned megaphone tilted toward the MAGA
right. Musk personally boosts Trump content, restores banned extremists, and rewires the algorithm to favor rage and conspiracy. He’s not an impartial referee — he’s an active
participant.
Meta, once wary of political entanglement, has drifted the same way. Mark Zuckerberg, who has met repeatedly with Trump in recent months, has relaxed misinformation rules and
sidelined the civic-integrity teams that once tried to curb election lies.
The world’s largest communication platforms are no longer neutral infrastructure — they’re partisan
terrain.
So Democrats aren’t just losing the meme wars on content. They’re losing because the battlefield itself is owned by their opponents.
Trolling as
Strategy
Trump’s media machine doesn’t aim to persuade but to dominate. A racist AI image of Representative Hakeem Jeffries, a doctored clip mocking Adam Schiff, a
“Mean Girls”-style deportation video — every outrage doubles as a recruiting tool. The more Democrats denounce it, the more oxygen it gets.
This is asymmetrical warfare: One
side fights for moral clarity, the other for clicks. The result is a political landscape where cruelty is currency and the truth scrolls past unnoticed.
The Coming Storm: Sora
2 and the Death of Reality
If this sounds chaotic now, imagine what happens when Sora 2 arrives.
The next generation of generative video — capable of
producing photorealistic clips from text prompts — will make today’s meme wars look quaint. What the Dilley Meme Team does with Photoshop, tomorrow’s operatives will do with cinema.
A single staffer will be able to fabricate a “news clip” of a migrant riot, a fake confession, or a candidate caught on a hot mic — all indistinguishable from reality and ready to
trend before fact-checkers even wake up.
Republicans have already shown they’re willing to blur fact and fiction, to turn every issue into a hot-button spectacle. When that instinct
meets Sora 2-level video synthesis — distributed through platforms owned or influenced by Trump allies — the result won't just be misinformation, but the erasure of reality
itself.
What Democrats Need to Understand — Now
This isn’t about catching up on TikTok or hiring better digital staff. It’s about building a moral
strategy for the age of synthetic media — one that recognizes the infrastructure itself has been captured, and that truth must now be rebuilt from the ground up.
If Democrats want to
survive the next cycle, they’ll have to learn not just how to meme, but how to model truth. Because when Sora 2 arrives, the contest won’t be between left and right — it
will be between the real and the unreal.