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Earlier this month, Elon Musk’s car company Tesla pulled a publicity stunt outside the White House. Several electric vehicles, including a boxy stainless-steel Cybertruck, were paraded around the White House for Donald Trump to see in front of a slew of news cameras. From a photo standpoint, it was pretty absurd, turning the seemingly stately presidential residence into something that resembled the set of a car commercial. (The clash of high and low characters was reminiscent of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference that Rudy Giuliani held on Trump’s behalf after the 2020 election.) Trump, playing the role of a demanding customer, climbed into a gleaming red Tesla Model S. Musk walked around the car, ready to help his fictional customer, and pointed to the brakes and accelerator. “It’s like driving a golf cart,” he said. Trump, likely admiring the touchscreen instead of buttons, exclaimed, “Wow! This is great… It’s all computer-based!”
The event was an obvious attempt to boost Tesla’s stock price, which has come under pressure in recent months amid rising anti-mask sentiment among the public. But it was Trump’s terse retort that stole the show. He’s always been a master of catchphrases, sometimes even when his delivery was casual. (Remember “covfefe”?) “Everything’s a computer,” with its terse, fragmented syntax, perfectly captures the bewildering era we live in, as technology permeates every aspect of our lives — even, in the mad enthusiasm of Musk’s DOGE, the federal government. Tesla is a computer; artificial intelligence is a computer; politics is a computer. Am I a computer, too? The phrase quickly became a meme, used to caption everything from scenes from The Matrix and Star Wars to images of Kim Kardashian with the humanoid Tesla robot she’s been acting out lately.
The phrase is full of excitement, but also ambiguity. It can be said with joy or with trepidation. Above all, it reflects a certain dismay at the turbulent unpredictability of our times, and in this regard, it has much in common with other memes that have become popular in the early months of Trump’s second term. As I noted in a column last year, the 2024 election has been characterized online by brain rot memes—meaningless clashes of images that make a lot of noise but little coherent effect. (For example: Kamala Harris and brat summer.) Now the brain rot continues, but the underlying theme has become more dire. We engage in memes to express our anxiety that what’s to come might be even more chaotic than what’s already happening.
Another recent example: “Trump took the egg. The egg is gone.” The phrase comes from Michael Sweeney, a San Diego video editor who occasionally makes political ads for the Democratic Party. He was at his local Costco, where shoppers were buying up the maximum number of eggs allowed: two sixty-egg cartons each. Sweeney grabbed one of the last eggs off the shelves and reposted a photo of the empty shelves on February 4 to the social media site Bluesky with the caption, which quickly went viral. Sweeney told me recently, “Unlike a lot of the problems in government that stem from Trump’s incompetence, this one is very easy to spot and is obviously a problem even for people who don’t follow politics.” The phrase morphed into “Trump took the egg,” and then became a social media meme for more photos of empty shelves and charts of rising egg prices. Tacos in Virginia used this as an excuse for a buy-one-get-one-free breakfast promotion: “Trump takes the egg. Brazos gives the egg.”
Democrats are having a hard time crafting any effective message in opposition to the second Trump administration. One recent round of videos of Democratic senators’ speeches was savagely mocked for repeating tired talking points. In the absence of anything more inspiring, the “Trump takes _____” formula — fill in the blank with “egg,” “cancer research,” or “Social Security” — is, as Sweeney puts it, “kind of self-consciously stupid, but at least it feels like you’re landing a punch.” Another popular target of late has been Vice President J.D. Vance. Vance had made little impression in the new administration until he helped Trump berate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last month in a televised meeting from the Oval Office. Vance sat on a couch, looking something like a petulant child, before suddenly jumping up from his seat to demand that Zelensky “say thank you.” It was Vance's first public moment as vice president, and the meme machine was off to the races: Vance as Humpty Dumpty; Vance as a toddler in a propeller hat with a lollipop; Vance as a hippie troubadour with a beard and a lot of frizz. The weirder it was — Vance at the center of a nuclear explosion — the more appropriate.
A version of the same meme about Vance first appeared last October, when Republican Congressman
Sourse: newyorker.com
