Description
Memes were central to the Trump/MAGA 2024 election campaign and have become a key focus of digital diplomacy by US State social media accounts, including the White House and Department of Homeland Security. This paper situates the growing popularity, circulation and affective excitements that pertain to MAGA memes in the IR literature on humour and global politics in general, and the emerging work on the affective politics of memetic engagement, in particular. Building on the complex, polysemic and rhizomatic qualities associated with meme cultures, we explore the affective dimensions of MAGA memes to identify the contingent and often counter-intuitive politics of these ecologies of meaning making. In particular, drawing on our previous work on ontological (in)security that identifies the links between the anxiety alleviating potential of humour and how its routinisation through memetic engagement can build political identity, we provide a critical perspective on differing forms of affect, including, excitement, oppositional anger, playful joy and ‘cringe’. In critical terms, a key reason why the ‘troll President’ has so successfully mobilised the affective ecology of MAGA memes is through his openness to bottom up and participatory forms of memeing. We provide theoretical and practical reasons why more recent appropriations of meme culture by state institutions, especially in what might be termed the ‘second wave’ of JD Vance memes, may backfire.'
