Pepe the Frog and Meme Rhetoric

By Zack Boehm on September 16, 2016

This week, Donald Trump Jr. posted a meme on his Instagram.

In a “hilarious” and “trenchant” response to Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment, the meme, a riff on an Expendables movie poster, sees Donald Trump girded by a phalanx of his most loyal, steadfast surrogates. All of the expected characters make an appearance. There’s a pensive looking Mike Pence and a scowling Eric Trump. There’s Ben Carson looking equal parts pained and aghast and there’s Chris Christie shouting at who knows what (presumably whichever political advisor convinced him to forfeit any of his remaining dignity and board the Trump Train as Donald’s personal fettered lap dog).

via ibtimes.co.uk

But wait. Who’s that there standing next to Rudy Giuliani? Who’s that with the unctuous face, the unwieldy machine gun, and the flaxen Trump wig? Who’s that… amphibian?

That is the smarmy, sneering visage of Pepe the Frog.

Real meme heads will be familiar with Pepe. He’s existed in the constellation of memetic images for well over a decade, and his popularity peaked a few years ago when he leapt into the mainstream and enjoyed a spell of pulverizing ubiquity.

But late stage Pepe has fallen in with a seedy crowd.

Recently, Pepe’s bulbous froggy face has been adopted by the Alt-Right movement—the strain of far right, white-grievance conservatism that seems to be metastasizing throughout the entire Republican party—who have dressed him up in Nazi regalia and re-branded him as an emblem for white nationalism. Where Pepe was once circulated as a kind of universal shorthand for impotent sadness, he’s now been imbued with virulent themes like xenophobia, racism, and Hitler-worship.

It’s likely that Donald Trump Jr. had no idea about the ideological baggage that came with posting a picture of a smirking frog humanoid, but when the media realized that Pepe’s inclusion in the meme probably had something to do with the not insignificant intersection of people who identify as both Trump supporters and Neo-Nazi’s, Trump Jr. was excoriated. Ultimately, Trump Jr’s miscalculated memeing fueled the inexorable political punditry media machine for what felt like days. Countless stories were published that aimed to trace the history Pepe’s Alt-Right iconographic popularity, and for a moment the most important figure in American politics was not a Democrat or a Republican, but an animated frog.

via pinterest.com

In other words, with less than two months until the election, the American media spent nearly an entire business week discussing Pepe the Frog.

In some ways, it isn’t surprising that a meme was able to generate such a torrent of hot takes. This whole election has been characterized by cartoonish bombast and characters that are so organically farcical that they’re putting satirists out of their jobs. On the other hand, when a real venerable media institution like The Atlantic publishes a long-form interview with Pepe’s original illustrator, it’s hard not to wonder if this isn’t the nadir of an already absurd election cycle.

But since we’re here talking about it, I believe that there is an important lesson to be learned from the history of the Pepe meme, a lesson that may help to illuminate part of the way that our political discourse has degenerated during this election season.

The most important quality of memes (what a way to start a sentence) is that they, fundamentally, have no intrinsic meaning. Their significances are absolutely elastic, which is precisely why they propagate. The original definition of the term “meme” as it was deployed by biologist Richard Dawkins (yep, we’re doing this) describes a meme as any unit of culture or behavior that can be passed on or replicated. The behavior doesn’t necessarily have to be good or bad or meaningful at all, it just needs to have the potential for transmission.

Internet memes function identically. A meme like Pepe does not require some inborn meaning. Indeed, the less built-in meaning a meme has, the more transmissible the meme. The more room for customization people have, the more room to impute their own meanings. Pepe is just a picture of a frog. A signifier without significance. And this is why he is such a prolifically successful meme—he can mean anything to anyone at any time. Unfortunately, his inherent meaningless also renders him vulnerable to becoming a symbol for Neo-Nazism. Such are the vagaries of memeship.

While memes are constitutionally meaningless, we expect language to operate differently. We expect the modality of language to exist necessarily in order to express meaning, to communicate information. We expect words to each have a clear, specific significance, and when those words are connected we expect the resulting ideas to be meaningful.

Donald Trump and some of his supporters consistently defy these expectations.

Trump’s (non-teleprompted) speeches, when read on transcript, are often utterly vacuous. They’re barely lucid, they’re meandering and disjointed, they’re turgid with tangents, and they’re sometimes totally composed of meaningless buzz phrases about winning and making great deals. He’s also made it a matter of policy to keep making patently, verifiable false statements until journalists just stop challenging him. It doesn’t matter how incontrovertible the evidence is that Trump, despite his claims, supported the Iraq war, because it’s not the meaning of his words that matter. It’s their potential for transmission.

As another example of Trump’s memeifying of language, consider this tweet from Trump Jr. (he’s had a tough week).

The rhetoric Trump Jr. is using here, and the ideology that he is invoking, is clearly far more germane to leftist politics than the politics of his father, and it’s borderline offensive given how eager Trump has been to gloat about his own backroom dealings with government officials. This is a Twitter missive about “aristocrats” in DC coming from the son of a purported billionaire who has boasted in the past about bribing politicians. But, again, it doesn’t matter that Trump Jr. is shamelessly appropriating the language of the left in support of a candidate with some of the most conservative policies in American history, and it doesn’t matter that it’s brazenly hypocritical. Because it has the potential for transmission.

Of course, this kind of meme-rhetoric has existed forever, but never has a candidate made it so central to their method of communication. It routinely appears as though Trump isn’t at all concerned with the validity of the things he says, so long as those things fit neatly on a poster board at rally or on a bright red hat. Pepe’s meaninglessness meant that he ended up in the clammy grip of internet bigots. Let’s be careful about how we treat Trump’s rhetoric.

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