The decisive moment of donald trump as presidential candidate to date – the one who gave rise to all the others – went down an escalator in a tower he developed during a TV appearance he staged to build a wish-fulfillment empire he created.
Kamala Harris’ defining moment as a presidential candidate to date – the one that gave rise to all the others – was a British pop star she had never met, referencing an album she hadn’t heard in a post she didn’t control, using a term she did not have. I don’t know.
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The presidential contest now unfolding is about many things – globalism versus nativism, feminism versus machismo, conscience versus musk, positivity versus anxiety and, of course, competing views on climate, abortion and immigration. But it’s also about something else: radically different communication philosophies.
In Trump, Republicans have a classic form of charisma: narratives are written for maximum entertainment, directed by an author, and disseminated to the masses with a specific set of goals.
In Harris, the Democrats have a strongly current style, in which an army of people far removed from politics shape messages that are then channeled by the campaign, which often serves more as the story’s reactive subject than its shepherd.
Call it reality TV leaders versus TikTok Ticket.
“What we see before us is practically a laboratory experiment in two different approaches to media,” said longtime media veteran Bob Thompson. Professor at Syracuse University and observer of our communication culture, when contacted about the matter last week.
That’s actually true. JD Vance got where he is thanks to a literary bestseller, his top-down form of messaging. Tim Walz happened because groups of online users decided to raise him after watching several of your videos. (Although he did partly engineer his rise; He’s still a politician.)
meme culture when applied to campaigns, it has a kind of feedback dynamic. Fans spontaneously rush in with a message; the campaign then takes hold of it and guides them. Take Swifties to Kamala, a group started by Gen Z fans with no connections to either the star or the candidate. In just a few weeks, the group accumulated 34,000 followers on Instagramspawned a series of TikTok remixes (if you’ve ever wanted to hear political rants included in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me,” here’s your chance) and spawned at least two callbacks to the campaign — which then dispatched Swifties to get out and spread the word the message even more.
There was also the now famous Post by Charli XCX “kamala IS brat” three weeks ago, a “I like Ike” for great-grandchildren. Although the post was not commissioned by Harris, the campaign quickly jumped on board. changing their social origins to reflect the new reality of speed. Why order a campaign bus when you can roam the streets at a different frequency?
The characters in this scheme are less fleshed out than the crowdsourced ones. Harris’ most famous quote: “I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. Do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’” is a telling reference to a 2023 speech in which she was quoting someone else. And yet it has become one of the most well-known pronouncements from any presidential candidate in recent memory, thanks to a series of people who anointed him that way — and then replaced each other to spread the word through a wave of dance remixes, lime green t-shirts and coconut emoji.
The idea of an online army of pop-stan operatives stands in stark contrast to Harris’s opponent.
Trump was, it is true, once an innovative social media implementer in his own right, defining his candidacy (and later his presidency) by Tweets sent at all hours of the night. But even those had a decidedly old-school vibe, scripted episodes of a drama that one man programmed like an impulsive network executive. Even your own people I often didn’t know what was coming.
The centrality of this approach to his electoral success was highlighted on Friday, when a new role of researchers from the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University concluded that Trump’s appearance in The Apprentice enabled his victory in 2016. His portrayal as “‘America’s Boss’ – a successful businessman; an experienced negotiator; a tough but supportive mentor; adept at reaching lucrative deals in high-pressure situations” was what “increased Donald Trump’s electoral performance in the 2016 Republican primaries”, the The American Political Science Review wrote.
Trump’s MO was to create a persona that he then tightly controlled. How the old Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt wrote in a report full of information Slate in May, what the series did was nothing less than invent and introduce a character from the franchise.
“On the show, he seemed to demonstrate impeccable business instincts and unparalleled wealth, even though his businesses had barely survived multiple bankruptcies,” Pruitt wrote. Having been given the role of a lifetime, Trump went on to perfect it and perform it on the world’s biggest stages.
Trump’s transition to new media has turned out to be less smooth. Last week at Mar-a-Lago, he did a live interview with right-winger Adin Ross on the video game platform Kick, which featured unpleasant moments like Ross showing him how the chat feature worked. Far from making him look young, the contrast with a 23-year-old influencer actually made Trump look even older and resulted in some laughing comment from the gaming community.
“Trump is, in some ways, trying to improve these appearances. It’s really hard to do, and I’m not sure he should do it,” said Liz Stahl, founder of the Los Angeles-based social media consultancy. At homewhen asked in an interview how she thought such efforts were going.
In fact, the most successful viral moment in the Trump-Vance campaign was of the unwanted kind, when a series of mocking memes emerged several weeks ago about the Ohio senator allegedly admitting in his book that he had achieved a different kind of conference with your sofa. He hadn’t. But just like the pre-internet virality that hurt previous candidates — since Lyndon B Johnson’s infamous 1964 “daisy” ad insinuate that Barry Goldwater would bring a nuclear war on the US to George HW Bush’s Notorious “Willie Horton” Ad in 1988, claiming that Michael Dukakis was freeing dozens of rapists and murderers – the truth of the claim mattered less than the strength of the message.
The same story was happening this weekend when Trump used Celine Dion’s theme song from Titanic at a campaign rally in Montana, which prompted lots of jokes online about how the candidate’s arc paralleled that of the film. Harris’ campaign was quick to jump. Defamation circa 2024 does not require the candidate to dish out the dirt; they just need to show up without a towel when someone else does.
However, experts say it would be madness to assume an all-bottom-up approach from the Democratic candidate. “There is no doubt that there is a huge increase in organic interest in Kamala Karris,” said Samuel Woolley, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh and longtime director of the propaganda research project at University of Texas Center for Media Engagement, who is a leading expert on the origins and implications of influencer content. “But there is certainly inorganic content being pushed as well,” he said when contacted this weekend, using the term to denote content that is being dictated by someone other than the poster.
This is made possible by a range of sophisticated, high-level consultancies hired by campaigns, such as the liberal-leaning People firstwho pay or simply coordinate influencers’ content without revealing their involvement.
“Employing influencers has become a pretty standard practice in political campaigns, and Harris is doing it very shrewdly,” Woolley said. In fact, discerning what is paid content, let alone stopping it, is extremely difficult; Social media companies have shown little interest in publicizing or stopping these deals, while the FEC has remained as indifferent to regulating them as traditional political ads.
Even pure organic content can be difficult to track, with each moment of origin leading back to something that came before (you could even say it didn’t fall from a coconut tree). In fact, Charli XCX’s post itself was not the beginning, but a response to a series of organic memes that already existed on TikTok, fitting Harris’ speeches to Charli’s tracks. (That all this is unfolding against the Legislative back-and-forth over TikTok banin fact, it’s its own form of viral deliciousness.)
All of this meme content harkens back to the old ways of 20th century media momentum builders. But it also differs from them. If “I Like Ike” propelled Eisenhower to the presidency with a Roy O. Disney jingle and an everyone-is-doing-it vibe, “kamala IS brat” has yet to prove it can last until voting begins, much less influence behavior then.
“Social media virality generally only works for a political campaign if there is a bridge to the issues – to something substantive,” said social media consultant Stahl. “Otherwise it’s just a lot of momentum going nowhere.” (Some of the earliest research after the viral wave shows Marked bumps for Harrisbut causality is difficult to prove.)
It would be tempting to see Harris’ victory in November as a new day, the passing of the baton from a single controlled spectacle to the unruly fragments of a thousand dance remixes – the lime-green coolness of a meme overtaking the one that can’t look away from the orange. A showman’s sunset.
On the other hand, a Trump victory would prove the durability of the form of reality.
Voting is more complicated than that, of course, and such conclusions would be easy. Still, American media culture rarely brings such a complete transition to a new era, let alone offers a national election with two candidates on such opposite sides of its border. Whatever happens in November – or next week – a new set of media colors has emerged. And now that this has happened, politics may never be seen in the same way again.
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