Trump's COVID Diagnosis: One Man's Super-Spreader is Another Man's Meme Goldmine

It needs no introduction — 2020 has been marred by the coronavirus pandemic. From Wuhan, China to Portland, Maine, nearly every corner of the globe has felt the sting and loss caused by the outbreak. America, in particular, has been hit hard, and very recently, the senior members of the Trump administration have become the new victims of the disease, including the president himself. Unsurprisingly, this event has resulted in a huge influx of memes on the subject.

Looking back to the onset of this meme phenomenon, many sources point to the Rose Garden ceremony on September 26th as the origin of this superspreader event. As a result, President Donald Trump contracted COVID-19 and was rushed to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center roughly one week later. There, he began Remdesivir therapy as well as Dexamethasone (steroid) injections. With the President’s return to the White House earlier this week, many cameras caught him appearing to be short of breath after his mask removal. So, as the internet does, it took real-life imagery and began using it to create memes in rapid succession.

The one commonality that any creator can attest to is that politics, and especially American politics, are a huge source for memes. Various aspects of politics have been a focal point for meme culture for about as long as memes have been around, but recent years have seen a continual increase in this.

In 2016, from the side-by-side style of Bernie or Hillary? to the wide variety of political Pepe The Frog depictions, meme culture seems increasingly intertwined with political events. Trump's reality-show-like one-liners and wild facial expressions make him a prime candidate for memes. At the end of the day, anything Trump does will likely be dominating the media, and thus, will trickle down into the memesphere.

With the latest influx of Trump-related memes centered around his COVID diagnosis, much of the online discussion has to do with his administration's overall handling of the pandemic. The administration has been criticized for its mixed messages and slow response time to the pandemic, which is commonly found in memes related to his presidency around the web. As noted above, the Rose Garden ceremony was mostly maskless and lacked proper social distancing practices, so the fact that many senior officials, including the president, contracted the virus gives many Trump administration critics strong schadenfreude.

This schadenfreude is the driving feeling behind many of the biggest memes that have come up in the wake of Trump’s COVID diagnosis. Twitter users took strongly to the memes with video edits and used Melania Trump’s infamous jacket to celebrate and mock the Trumps. Reddit saw the subreddit /r/reactiongifs reach /r/all, comparing Trump’s shortness of breath to alcohol intoxication at a house party, among many other derivations. The subreddit /r/dataisbeautiful has also been analyzing metadata around the event, which has produced some interesting graphs showcasing the global reaction to the event. Overall, the potential of the event still remains, yet as American politics move fast leading into major elections, the specifics of the last few days will undoubtedly fall into obscurity.

The election season is full of potential events for memes, and although it happened this week, Trump’s return from the hospital is already beginning to fade away despite being at the forefront of political memes recently. Images like the Mike Pence Fly during last night's VP debate are already taking over the world of political memes. Going forward, the actual hospitalization will likely remain a prominent talking point as a pivotal moment in this year’s election, but it probably won't be the dominant event for political memes in the days to come.

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