‘Don’t panic people! Trump will tweet the virus away': memes contesting and confirming populist political leaders during the COVID-19 crisis

ABSTRACT

When the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a global health crisis in early 2020, memes of populist political leaders were disseminated in abundance on social media. At first sight, these political memes satirized and exposed the hazardous actions, appearances and communicative strategies of the populist leaders in this unforeseen situation that not only unsettled existing power balances, but also standard modes of professional and personal conduct. Based on a thematic analysis of memes of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and US President Donald Trump during the COVID-19 crisis, this paper finds, however, that the political memes’ critical and affirmative power conflated. This challenged their potential as counter-narratives to the actions and communication of these populist leaders. We argue that this can be explained by an overlap in the communicative form of populism and memes: Political memes are a social media genre that uses incongruent humor to expose the contradictions, conflicts and hypocrisy of populist politicians. Similarly, populist politicians communicate in polarizing and personalizing rhetoric that emphasizes conflicts and the mischiefs of others on social media and beyond. This raises the broader question of how populist leaders might be criticized and their actions subjected to scrutiny in political memes without feeding into their own communicative patterns and logics, and thus unintentionally confirming their worldview and interpretations of events.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• Boris Johnson
• Donald Trump
• political memes
• populism
• populist political leaders

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Nina Jerslev Svendsen for research assistance and the anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1101958/cumulative-coronavirus-cases-in-the-uk/ (retrieved February 9, 2021); https://www.statista.com/statistics/1101932/coronavirus-covid19-cases-and-deaths-number-us-americans/ (retrieved February 9, 2021).

2 The memes should be easily retrievable by using these search terms.

3 https://www.britannica.com/topic/plebeian (retrievedFebruary 16, 2021).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Velux Foundation: [Grant Number 00013143].

Notes on contributors

Nete Nørgaard Kristensen

Nete Nørgaard Kristensen is Professor of Media Studies at Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen, where she serves as Head of Section of Media Studies. She specializes in research about media and popular culture, cultural journalism and cultural criticism across platforms, and political communication. Her work has appeared in international journals such as Celebrity Studies; Communication, Culture & Critique; Digital Journalism; International Journal of Cultural Policy; Journalism; Journalism Practice; Journalism Studies; Media, War and Conflict; Sociology Compass; Television & New Media.

Mette Mortensen

Mette Mortensen is Professor and Deputy Head of Department at the Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen. She specializes in visual media studies and is the Principal Investigator of the research project “Images of Conflict, Conflicting Images” (2017-2022, Velux Foundation). Her work has appeared in journals such as Media, Culture & Society; Journalism; Convergence; Information, Communication & Society; International Journal of Communication; Journalism Studies; Journalism Practice, Digital Journalism; International Journal of Cultural Studies.