You Can’t Spell #ObaMAGAte without MAGA
Keyboard warriors, redpills, #Obamagate: within a weeks time, Donald Trump and his family shared a series of keywords, slogans video clips and memes on social media, signaling various subfactions of his online following and triggering questions as to what exactly is a keyboard warrior, what does it mean to be redpilled, and what exactly are the accusations fueling Obamagate? These terms, used by cultural insiders of the online far right, have quickly gone mainstream, as have the images and slogans used by these various groups to build coalitions.
In this week’s Meme War Weekly, we summarize the “New Deplorables,” the growing set of networked factions that support Trump online. These “keyboard warriors” come armed with their own memetic arsenal, but sometimes fight against each other, all in an effort to win recognition from Trump and ensure his victory in November.
We identify the coalescing of these different groups as “networked factions,” a term coined by journalist Lam Thuy Vo, to refer to a loosely affiliated tacit coalition whose overarching goal is to collectively generate political power through online organizing. Much of the content shared by these groups are junk news, misleading videos, and simple, authorless memes. Some of the more skillfully crafted videos circulating in these spaces were made by pseudonymous creators, who brand their work under pen names and have built significant online followings over the last three years. Some networked factions come together through the use of viral slogans, originating in the dark corners of the internet and ending up in Trump’s official messaging. In some cases, slogans shared by these networked factions end up in the real world, scrawled on poster boards or T-shirts at Trump political rallies and reopen America protests, like #Obamagate.
Over the next three weeks we will examine three groups at the frontlines of the meme wars: The MAGA Mainstream, QAnon, and The Groypers. Taken together, they make up a large proportion of the actors involved in the 2020 MAGA coalition. While they do not see eye to eye on all issues, they are certainly catching the President’s attention and heeding his call to action.
Meme War 2016 — What’s the same? What has changed?
Memes reportedly played a large role in the 2016 election, but not necessarily in the ways we expected. Upon his inauguration after an aggressive and non-traditional campaign, Trump was declared winner of the meme war. Since then, Trump continued to signal back and forth to various online communities influential in his 2016 rise. Exploiting hyperpartisan media divides, email dumps published by Wikileaks, and engagement with QAnon and other conspiracy communities, the Trump campaign and its affiliates drove online conversation everywhere from anonymous message boards, to social media platforms, to the mainstream press, and cable news. Called out by Hillary Clinton in 2016 as “the Deplorables,” the 2020 MAGA coalition is reformatting. His most loyal base is reconfiguring to meet the challenges posed by the pandemic in order to adapt to a very online 2020 campaign.
All these factions have roots in the past. The cast of “the deplorables” was best captured in this meme posted to Donald Trump Jr.’s Instagram in September 2016, where he highlighted the set of Trump’s most controversial boosters. Since then, several of these figures have endured public scandals and lost their platforms on social media. Roger Stone, well known media provocateur and close ally of President Trump, is currently appealing a 40 month prison sentence for false statements, obstruction, and witness tampering. Infowars host Alex Jones, longtime conspiracy theorist and an influential part of Trump’s 2016 alternative media campaign, faced near total deplatforming off social media for repeated attacks on the families of mass shooting victims. Former “alt right” booster, Milo Yiannopoulos suffered a similar fate after comments he made years ago resurfaced and made him persona non grata in the conservative movement.
Today, the “Alt Right” is deflated and old leaders, like Milo, are cast aside to make room for younger influencers, whose racist and sexist messaging has adapted to the new rules of platforms. We have also seen a professionalization of the MAGA meme makers, alongside a quarantining of some prominent memetic communities, like Reddit’s “the_donald” and 8chan, which has returned in form, but has fallen in popularity. The Pizzagate conspiracy has morphed into the QAnon movement, which positions Trump as an all-knowing messianic figure. Permutations of Pepe, the frog mascot of “the Alt-Right’’ and MAGA coalition turned hate symbol, have been remixed by “the Groypers,” a small faction of gen z cloaked under the banner of “American First.” Though some symbols and players may be familiar, they hint at much darker and more divisive times to come.
Here, we will take a short tour through the memes of the MAGA Mainstream, focusing on #Obamagate, a recently revived memetic slogan used by Trump to deflect criticism about his handling of the pandemic and to refocus controversy on the Obama administration and Joe Biden by association.
MAGA Mainstream
During his campaign and presidency, Trump consistently makes public targets of journalists, newspapers, and cable news networks, lashing out at reporters at press conferences and launching insults on Twitter. While Republican’s negative attitudes towards the media are tinged with distrust, many right wing pundits view mainstream media as a reprehensible target. Trump enjoys near unwavering support from AM radio hosts, Fox News, and One America News, and lashes out when more skeptical conservative voices like Neil Cavuto or Matt Drudge cover him critically. Trump’s team understands the value of a hyper-partisan media environment where he controls the agenda from his Twitter account, by publicly condemning news outlets and providing preferential access to others.
The situation is a bit different when we look at online content creators whose careers are enmeshed with Trump’s success. Those who primarily publish on social media, and on YouTube in particular, thrive when they create pro-Trump content. Loyalists like Diamond and Silk, Mark Dice, Steven Crowder, Candace Owens, and PragerU boast massive Youtube and Facebook views, filling a demand for MAGA-friendly content to counteract the programming of what Trump has branded the “fake news media.” The tacit coalition of 2016 has matured into a community of vloggers and professionalized content creators who are focusing their negative energy on Democratic candidate Joe Bidenand the former Obama administration.
In July 2019, Trump gathered together many of these online influencers and content creators for an “ugly and pointless” Social Media Summit at the White House. There, the work of Trump loyalists like cartoonist, Ben Garrison, and meme maker, Carpe Donktum, were honored alongside vloggers and pundits. Outside of the content created by this growing alternative influence network, the memes of the contemporary MAGA mainstream lack the insurgent energy seen in the memes of the 2016 election. As prominent conservative figures were forced to disavow the positions of the Alt-Right as racist, familiar imagery like Pepe have fallen out of style, replaced by escalating conspiratorial campaigns, like #Obamagate.
#Obamagate
Weirdly, it begins, not with a bang but a whisper. The keyword “Obamagate” has been around more than a year and is often paired with “Spygate,” a 2018 conspiracy theory that posits a spy was placed within Trump’s election campaign. Recently, Trump started posting the keyword, “OBAMAGATE!” on Twitter and Facebook without any other context to try to force this meme into existence.
As the major proponent of the birther conspiracy against Obama, Trump is no stranger to throwing out unfounded accusations against the former president. On May 10, after being publicly criticized by Obama for his handling of the COVID-19 crises, Trump took to Twitter, retweeting several tweets using the #Obamagate hashtag. Building off the moment of the Flynn acquittal, Trump reintroduced Obama as a threat to his presidency, with a vague and versatile framing to account for lack of evidence to support his claims.
Promising investigations to his followers, coordinated efforts amongst many different right wing online factions helped get #Obamagate trending. As expected, attention to the trending hashtag triggered a wave of memes, giving Trump’s creative followers new material to remix. A particularly sticky phrase propagated in these memes, pointing out that “You can’t spell Obamagate without MAGA.”
While much of the MAGA mainstream material exists in support of Trump, an insurgent group is quickly making its mark in the conversation: the QAnon community. Their signature branding, which we will detail next week, is present in much of the memes around Obamagate. When networked factions congregate around a common goal, much of their content starts to overlap, merge, and reinforce a more unified narrative. It has yet to be seen how much impact fringe communities will have on the MAGA mainstream, but as conspiratorial framing seeps into all aspects of public life, we may truly be in the calm before the storm.
