Donald Trump Aims to Turn the World into a Right-Wing Meme | Vanity Fair

Donald Trump spends a lot of his time online. But there are those days when his posting is so crazed and prolific that it makes the news. Wednesday was such a day: The Republican seeking the most powerful office in the country fired off post after post on his Truth Social and X pages, amplifying crude attacks on Kamala Harris and calling for the jailing of his antagonists.

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Trump has seemed agitated since Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, shaking up the race to the White House and putting him on his heels in crucial swing states. But what got him worked up this week? The superseding indictment special counsel Jack Smith filed resuscitating the election interference case that could put the GOP nominee’s efforts to subvert the democratic process back at the fore this fall—and possibly add to his rap sheet. In a series of social media missives Wednesday, Trump falsely decried Smith’s case as the real “election interference” being perpetrated against him by Harris and Biden. “This shouldn’t be happening in America!” he wrote, calling for the case to be dismissed and for the partial gag order in his New York hush-money case—where he was found guilty on 34 counts and faces sentencing next month—to be thrown out.

Trump also spent time Wednesday sharing posts promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory, baselessly suggesting that Harris, Biden, Smith, Barack Obama, and others should be imprisoned, and implying his Democratic opponent traded sexual favors to advance her career. The boorish, antidemocratic fare seems unlikely to help him in the real world. But his outrageousness may serve him well in another sphere: “WE’RE DOMINATING [HARRIS] ON SOCIAL MEDIA,” Trump posted Wednesday. “WE’RE BEATING HER ‘LIKE A DRUM,” he continued, LIKE WE WILL BEAT HER ON NOVEMBER 5TH.”

It’s a telling line: For all the meme-speak and social media savvy of the Harris campaign, Trump remains the online candidate. It’s been said that Trump posted his way to the White House in 2016—and, throughout his political life, social media both informed his thinking and was a tool he used to drive news cycles, settle scores, and even instigate an insurrection. But his 2024 run has seemed even more steeped in the online culture of far-right extremists: His running mate, JD Vance, is obsessed with other people not having children. Trump, meanwhile, has embraced figures like Elon Musk, who fancies X as a digital town square rather than the sewer underneath it accumulating all manner of pointless dreck and toxic sludge. And his administration, if he wins, would likely include figures like Vivek Ramaswamy, whose surrogacy on Trump’s behalf often amounts to social media stunts.

Of course, “destroying” someone on social media is not the same as destroying them in real life—and while self-described “Crypto President” Trump hawks NFT trading cards and raves on Truth Social, Harris and Tim Walz have a compelling case to make to real people about things that really matter: their rights, their pocketbook, their democracy, and of course, a future in which they don’t need to hear about Trump’s compulsive shitposting.