Memes Control: The Culture War of Images
Wolfgang Ullrich

On 6 September 2025 Elon Musk posted a tweet featuring an animated meme: an ox-drawn covered wagon from the early computer game The Oregon Trail, which dramatises the life and hardships of 19th-century American settlers. The original caption, “You have died of dysentery,” was replaced with “You have died from lack of memes.”¹ Musk added only the shorthand “fr” – “for real” – as a gesture of assent. The implication was clear: anyone unable to translate their world view into sharp, witty, aggressive memes – into snappily captioned images, into newly reimagined visual forms – would perish, losing both attention and followers. The message, dripping with schadenfreude, was aimed at those in the United States who, under Trump and the MAGA movement, feel powerless, abandoned, threatened by arbitrariness or even existentially endangered. So be it: you woke Democrats, you migrants and globalists, you minorities and elites – you’ve lost. You failed to grasp how political majorities are won today, how opponents are defeated. Bill Clinton’s slogan “It’s the economy, stupid” is obsolete; the mantra now must be “It’s the memes, stupid” – a phrase already circulating after Trump’s first electoral victory in 2016, and even more so after his second.²

What unfolded beneath Musk’s tweet was telling. Thousands of followers and fans commented, mostly in the form of memes themselves. They dusted off old favourites or crafted new ones – riffing on Musk’s post or on current events – always intent on proving that they did not suffer from a “lack of memes” and thus belonged to the strong, the winners. Taken together, the replies form a compendium of meme formats popular on the right and among libertarians – at times viciously anti-Islamic, cynically anti-feminist, openly racist, Trump-idolizing or Musk-worshipping. Scrolling through them quickly conveys the energy, anger, and resentment fuelling meme culture in the MAGA movement, while also exposing the disparate milieus and interests it unites: from the evangelical traditionalist to the gamer-incel, the “America First” patriot, the libertarian entrepreneur, the white supremacist rocker, the “trad wife” influencer.

The Great Meme War

Together, they have fought and won what they themselves call “The Great Meme War”. Declared during Trump’s 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton and retrospectively mythologised as a turning point, it has since become a founding myth of the movement.³ Activists who first gained notoriety on 4chan and soon spread across all social networks dubbed themselves “meme warriors”. They see themselves as an army, waging a mission that is as much ideological as it is military, and they have learned to produce, post and disseminate memes with such strategic planning and professional coordination that the analogy to a military campaign is hardly far-fetched. The fusion of an oppositional, rebellious attitude with the affordances of new media proved remarkably effective – especially since the Democrats in power at the time had little incentive to fight with equal determination.

What is new since the start of Trump’s second term is that memes have now conquered the official accounts of the White House and government departments – and that many of them are AI-generated, allowing for faster, louder, more suggestive messaging. Even more novel, and consequential, is the degree to which the style and logic of memes now shape American politics as a whole. Political decisions are designed from the outset as if they were memes come to life – or, conversely, as easily convertible into memes without further translation. At times, it is impossible to tell what came first: the meme or the policy. Political action itself has become as punchline-driven, garish and crude as the average meme, reduced to a single striking motif and appearing as nothing more than a banal expression of cynicism, mockery, vindictiveness, or related emotions. “The images seem to call forth the violence they depict.”⁴

Alligator Alcatraz

Consider one example. In June 2025 it was announced that a camp was being built in Florida to detain migrants suspected of being in the country illegally. At the unveiling, the project was given a name: Alligator Alcatraz. The double meaning was hard to miss. Alcatraz, until the 1960s, was a notorious prison island in California, with a high-security block for dangerous criminals, later immortalised in films like The Rock and in popular culture. Naming the new detention facility after it suggests that its inmates are likewise hardened criminals (when, in fact, they are denied due process altogether). At the same time, the name implies that escape is impossible – not because of an island setting but because of the alligators inhabiting the swampy surroundings. These, along with resident pythons, were explicitly invoked by the state attorney general at the press conference as the facility’s natural wardens.⁵

This alone was enough to ignite the sadistic imagination of MAGA supporters, for whom (illegal) migration is the most inflammatory of all issues. Within days, numerous AI-generated images circulated showing alligators as prison guards, often anthropomorphised with sunglasses or uniforms meant to look humorous.⁶ When it became clear that the theme resonated, the Department of Homeland Security, responsible for arresting and deporting migrants, released its own Alligator Alcatraz meme on Instagram and X: four alligators in front of a barbed-wire fence and guard tower, each wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with ICE, the agency in charge of detentions.⁷ Three days later, the US president visited the construction site and joked about the reptiles’ watchdog role (“This is what you need, … a lot of cops in the form of alligators”).⁸ Shortly afterward, the accounts of Donald Trump and the White House each followed up with their own variation: Trump posed alongside three ICE alligators, depicted less as animals than as horror-movie dinosaurs or reptiles, the scene bathed in ominous nocturnal light. Across the image, styled like a film poster, appeared the camp’s name and the slogan “Make America Safe Again”.⁹

In this way, the meme turned the camp – and the fates of thousands – into an entertainment spectacle with Trump cast as its action-hero lead. Its surreal, absurd aesthetic both distracts from the inhuman severity of deportation policy – inviting viewers to laugh at cruelty – and incites further variations, giving MAGA supporters and Trump fans the chance to invent their own gags or feed prompts to AI image generators. Critical responses did appear – memes likening the camp to Auschwitz or other Nazi concentration camps – but these were far outnumbered by approving comments and a torrent of new alligator memes. In one, the detention centre becomes a poster for an even bloodier movie (No Escape, No Mercy). In another, Trump rides an alligator like a general. In yet another, he dances with a team of alligators, dons a reptile mask, or feeds the ravenous beasts. Still others depict alligators devouring migrants (sometimes as GIFs or video clips), or an army of alligators arrayed before the Statue of Liberty.

Memes as Instruments of Power

Could what is happening in the United States during Trump’s second term also occur elsewhere? Will politics in other countries, sooner or later, likewise become “memeified”? The attempts of right-wing movements in Europe are plainly visible on social media, as are their programmatic declarations. One far-right magazine hails memes as “cognitive bioweapons in the information war”.¹⁰ A right-wing activist Handbook for Media Guerrillas – and the title is no exaggeration – declares that “images are an excellent means of conducting memetic warfare”, extols “memetic barrages”, and describes the use of social media explicitly as an aggressive strategic game aimed at defeating the enemy and delivering the “final blow”.¹¹

Yet this requires a movement with strong popular appeal, one capable of forming an active and relatively stable online community. Without that base, memes and other content will not be retweeted, liked, commented on or carried into other milieus often enough. Once such momentum is achieved, a leader is also essential – one as meme-savvy and meme-friendly as Donald Trump. Only such a figure can command more followers than rival politicians and harness enough energy to actually win a “meme war”.

But what if such a figure were leftist, woke, queer or all of these combined? The chances of waging a successful “meme war” are slim. Since the dominant social networks in the Western world are largely US-based, and often sympathetic to Trump’s MAGA movement, their algorithms and filters leave little room for counter-hegemonic victories. In Europe and beyond, where no independent platforms exist, memeification is likely to follow the American model. Elon Musk’s promotion of right-wing populists like Alice Weidel or Tommy Robinson – boosting their visibility on his platform and posting their meme-ready statements and videos without the slightest interest in political context or basic facts – shows just how strongly politics elsewhere can be shaped by network owners abroad. On the very day Musk mocked his political opponents for their “lack of memes”, he also tweeted once again: “If AfD doesn’t win, Germany is kaput.”¹²

For Musk and his ilk, then, the “meme war” is no longer merely a national affair; it has become a global meme war, perhaps even more: “Who controls the memes, controls the universe,” as another of his favourite slogans has it.¹³ This may sound like pure megalomania, but it underscores one of the most spectacular developments of any media format in little more than a decade – and should be counted among the great research questions for scholars across disciplines. The product, originally, of a vague oppositional spirit, and often skirting the limits of taste, memes have now become nothing less than symbols of power. They function as a medium of governance and, increasingly, as instruments and models for legitimising power and advancing hegemonic interests.

Wolfgang Ullrich is an art historian and lives as a freelance author in Leipzig.