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Why do images of Donald Trump as a galactic emperor or as a resonate so deeply with some people? Memes don't just entertain—they shape how we identify with power, grievance and justice in the digital age.

A meme is a decontextualized video or image—often captioned—that circulates an idea, behavior or style, primarily through social media. As they spread, memes are adapted, remixed and transformed, helping to solidify the communities around them.

Trump, the meme pope

Days after Pope Francis's death in April 2025, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself in papal regalia on Truth Social. The White House's official X account then shared it, amplifying its reach.

Trump quickly as a joke, but the image lingered.

Two days later, another emerged: , blending Star Wars aesthetics with the visual rhetoric of Warhammer 40,000, a popular dystopian sci-fi franchise featuring authoritarian rulers, imperial armies and endless war.

Trump memes like these once circulated semi-ironically in social media subcultures like Reddit and 4chan under the banner "."

But what might previously have seemed like absurdist cosplay now carries the symbolic weight of executive power, blending religious and imperial imagery to project Trump as a mythical figure, not just a politician.

In-jokes

As I've argued in , these memes draw on cultural codes not to parody power but to usurp it as .

Fact-checking can't stop them. We know they are factually untrue, but they feel true and consolidate a shared sentiment among Trump's base.

The meme is —it's an only the in-group understands.

And that's the point.

A meme is an accelerant, delivering compressed emotional payloads, short-circuiting debate and reinforcing people's political identifications. Propelled by algorithms and designed to go viral, memes solicit immediate responses—outrage, loyalty, disgust, amusement.

Memes don't ask what's true or what's just.

Instead, they curate—and encode—emotional alignment, replacing liberalism's democratic ideal of reasoned public discourse with viral attachment: grievance recoded as identity.

Elon Musk and weaponizing empathy

On Feb. 20, 2025, days after Trump appointed Elon Musk to head his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Tesla founder appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering of conservative activists and officials from across the U.S.

At the conference, Musk brandished a chainsaw, declaring: "." An image of him holding the chainsaw later actually became a meme.

The image projects libertarian efficiency and masculine bravado, but it more than just mocks bureaucracy—it glorifies cutting ties to domestic, global and humanitarian responsibilities.

Far from being merely a meme, it advances a policy of neglect that intentionally lets others die.

Experts estimate that could result in over the next five years, disproportionately affecting marginalized populations whose historical exploitation helped generate the wealth now wielded as power.

Individuals vs. the collective

But we are not meant to feel empathy. , Musk called empathy "the fundamental weakness of western civilization," claiming it is "weaponized by the left."

Yet Musk doesn't reject empathy entirely—only empathy for individuals, which he said risks "civilizational suicide."

Instead, Musk believes we must have empathy for "civilization as a whole." Such rhetoric—sacrificing individuals for the collective—recalls a chilling Nazi-era slogan: Du bist nichts, dein Volk ist alles ("You are nothing, your people are everything"). Musk has also drawn criticism for making and ethno-nationalist statements .

Mangione, the meme martyr

If Trump and Musk memes stage fantasies of absolute power, Mangione memes reply with fantasies of redemptive rupture.

Accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, that champion vulnerability and social justice, opposing the billionaire class—figures like Trump and Musk—who put profits over people.

These memes appear to oppose the MAGA meme machine, encoding class struggle as quiet defiance and anti-authoritarianism. Unlike Musk's chainsaw-wielding bravado, which seems to mask a fragile ego, Mangione memes project a humble, .

Yet, like Trump and Musk, Mangione has become a brand. His face adorns T-shirts and "St. Luigi" , capitalizing on the popular meme that emerged soon after his arrest. This commodification mirrors right-wing meme economies, even if the message differs.

Emotional saturation

Mangione memes have helped raise over .

They don't just reflect feeling—they organize it, channeling it into cultural, political and literal currency, including a ($LUIGI) and a .

These memes share MAGA meme tactics: relentless repetition and emotional saturation. Instead of encouraging thoughtful debate, they rally communities around shared grievances, acts of defiance and collective faith.

Feeling our way through the feed

From MAGA to Mangione, meme-mythologies often function as rationalizations of violence—whether framed as righteous, purifying or revolutionary. But what unites Trump's papal cosplay, Musk's chainsaw and Mangione's martyrdom isn't their message but their form.

Whether cloaked in MAGA nostalgia or social justice sentiments, memes that appear to resist power often reproduce the structures that made that power so intoxicating in the first place.

We've seen how official White House and Department of Homeland Security social media memes have become , polarizing and even radicalizing.

Meanwhile, some liberals on the left continue to promote what is known as the ""—the belief that truth will prevail if all ideas are allowed to circulate freely. But reason doesn't always triumph over power. And memes aren't just ideas: they're technologies that bypass deliberation to shape our feelings, identities and ways of communicating.

Consumed by media

We no longer "consume" media: we're a and powering today's platforms. Like memes, AI tools like large language models can churn out plausible content that is nonetheless .

Musk's "I have become the meme" therefore reveals a paradox: he claims to master the meme, but no one can control its circulation or uptake. Trump and Mangione, too, are less individuals than avatars—produced by a digital culture that pre-shapes our perceptions of them.

The violence, however, is very real. If one violent act doesn't justify counter-violence, it nonetheless structures and occasions it. Each side claims it is just.

Memes don't ask: can we intentionally let others die and still be just? Answering this question is nearly impossible in a meme world. The answer will be a meme. And it will be a joke.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .