In 2019, during the final year of Donald Trump’s first presidential term, and amid calls for his impeachment, Trump’s official War Room re-election campaign released a video that superimposed Trump’s face onto Thanos—the powerful supervillain from the Marvel Comics universe. The clip is taken from Avengers: Endgame (2019), in which Thanos declares “I am inevitable” and attempts to snap his fingers and erase half of all life in the universe. The video then cuts to footage of Democratic leaders disintegrating into dust.
The video borrows the visual language of the Avengers films to cast Trump as the mighty figure who will prevail and ultimately destroy his opponents. Marvel Comics imagery was appropriated by the Trump universe on other levels as well. For example, some participants in the January 6 Capitol attack displayed images of The Punisher—a vigilante Marvel antihero—creating a cultural association between the fictional avenger and Trump.
While the political co-optation of Marvel characters by Trump and his supporters has largely been condemned by their original creators, references to superhero and antihero figures have nonetheless become a distinctive component of Trump’s communication strategy. This tactic has been addressed in a growing body of scholarly literature seeking to account for the unique amalgam of Trump’s political persona and his showman-like public communication.
The first part of this essay offers a brief overview of these scholarly approaches. The second part then examines how Trump, during his second presidential term, has been strategically using the official Instagram account of the White House to construct and project his “badass” superhero/antihero persona. That section further analyzes Trump’s avenger discourse, through which he symbolically casts himself as a vigilante figure determined to send packing the “fraudsters, liars, cheaters, globalists, and deep-state bureaucrats” and send home “illegal alien criminals.”
This illustrative analysis draws primarily on memes, as a form of “visual humor” and a subversive pop-cultural language. So-called “memetic warfare” has been recognized as a highly efficient tool in Donald Trump’s campaigns and spin machinery. This essay examines how this transgressive strategy has now been adopted as an official institutional form of communication by the highest political office in the country, The White House.
Donald Trump: A “badass” hero
Trump’s rise cannot be understood solely through traditional political analysis; it must also be read through the cultural logic of entertainment and fandom. Positioned as both politician and celebrity, Trump has been mobilizing affective attachments and participatory practices that resemble those found in pop-cultural fandoms, turning political support into a form of fan engagement.
Several interconnected approaches explain Trump’s rise through the lens of popular culture. The first is celebrity politics, defined as the fusion of celebrity culture and politics. Marijana Grbeša and Berto Šalaj portray Trump as the quintessential “celebrity populist,” who merges celebrity capital with populism. John Street, a pioneer of celebrity politics scholarship, emphasizes the significance of the genre from which a celebrity politician emerges, in Trump’s case, reality television. Laurie Ouellette similarly notes that Trump’s political persona draws heavily on “reality TV theatrics.”
The second perspective centers on authenticity as a core element of populist communication. Stefan L. Brandt’s notion of “authentic populism” suggests that Trump managed to appear as a genuine defender of ordinary people despite his wealth. Lore Sorensen identifies authenticity as one of the key “disruptive practices” of modern populists who challenge institutional norms.
A third strand of scholarship connects authenticity and disruption with impoliteness as a defining strategy of populist communication. Benjamin Moffitt’s concept of populists’ “bad manners” underscores how transgression helps them appear more “authentic” and “ordinary” than political elites. Alessandro Nai and Fernando Martinez i Coma describe populists as “agent provocateurs” who use outrage, self-scandalization, and bad manners to disrupt and attract attention, while Ruth Wodak, Jonathan Culpeper, and Elena Semino address the “shameless normalization of impoliteness” in the discourses of Trump and the late Silvio Berlusconi.
Yet, one of the most compelling accounts of Trump’s calculated naughtiness is that of Shawn McCreesh, a New York Times reporter who followed Trump on the 2024 campaign trail. McCreesh writes that Trump strategically mixed “comedy, fury, optimism, darkness and cynicism,” provoking a powerful response from audiences. Following the assassination attempt on Trump, people across the United States increasingly began to see him “as a cross between Rambo and John Gotti.” As McCreesh notes, “Americans love their antiheroes and action movies,” which is why Trump’s campaign embraced the “badass aesthetic.” Building on McCreesh’s insight, this essay uses this concept as an analytical lens to show how Trump’s social media strategy frames him as both a heroic and antiheroic avenger, with his political transgressions turned into a form of entertainment. “Badassism” is understood here as the deliberate performance of toughness, naughtiness, and norm defiance, often delivered with a comic edge.
The final analytical perspective is the superhero framework. Andrea Schneiker argues that Trump has strategically constructed a new kind of political brand as a “superhero anti-politician celebrity.” Drawing on Liesbet van Zoonen’s famous argument that celebrity politicians must appear both “just like us” and “more special” than us, Schneiker likens Trump to figures such as Superman and James Bond—an ordinary man who uses his “superpowers” to save his country in times of crisis. Because the enemies in Trump’s narrative are the (liberal) establishment and out-groups such as immigrants, this superhero persona is inherently populist or even illiberal populist. A key feature of Trump’s superhero branding is vindication: as Brandt notes, Trump presents himself as a vindictive hero who will rescue the “noble” but mistreated people from a corrupt elite. Slogans like “America First,”loaded with nativist connotations, reinforce this image of Trump as a messianic savior. Trump’s promise of national restoration and the revival of a “Golden Age of America” echoes broader cultural myths about America. In The Force of Fantasy: Restoring the American Dream, Ernest Bormann shows how Americans have repeatedly revived idealized visions of their country in times of perceived decline, integrating shared fantasies into a “coherent rhetorical vision.” Trump’s pledge to “Make America Great Again” follows this pattern but adds a distinctly nostalgic and conspiratorial tone. It exemplifies Svetlana Boym’s concept of “restorative nostalgia,” which combines the “restoration of origins” with conspiracy theory. Boym notes that such nostalgia relies on a Manichaean struggle between good and evil and on scapegoating a mythical enemy—a structure mirrored in Trump’s rhetoric, which identifies liberal elites, globalists, immigrants, and the “Deep State” as corruptors of the American dream.
By merging Bormann’s fantasy of communal revival with Boym’s logic of restorative nostalgia, Trump casts himself as the avenging hero, a savior uniquely capable of restoring the lost golden age of America and defeating its alleged destroyers. In this sense, his superhero populist brand promise not just political change but also redemption.
Memes: the weapons of mass disruption
This section analyzes meme posts from the White House Instagram account to show how Trump has been using the official state profile to disrupt the norms of conventional political communication and project himself as an avenging superhero/antihero. Jonathan Dean calls this the “memeification of politics,” defining memes as a form of “politicized visual humor” marked by irony, subversion, and shareability. Memes combine humor and provocation in ways that align with Trump’s performance of “badassism.” They also help mainstream hostility toward out-groups by framing derogatory content as jokes, thus serving a populist discourse that thrives on provocation and political incorrectness. “Memetic warfare” is not only a trademark of Trump’s political communication but also of the fan and fanspiracy communities that are implicitly or explicitly aligned with Trump. Moreover, memes’ participatory nature—inviting remixing, sharing, and emotional investment—mobilizes a fandom logic, where Trump’s followers can co-create and reinforce his political brand.
Pop-cultural references and Trump’s superhero/antihero persona
The White House’s Instagram feed shows only posts created by the current Trump administration. It is an established practice that every new administration creates new official account for the incoming team and transfers all followers to this new account. The Instagram account analyzed here had 1,369 posts and 9.6 million followers as of September 17, 2025. The main caption of the account, “The Golden Age of America Begins Right Now,” embodies the discourse of revival.
All White House posts were collected and categorized according to format, theme, and discursive strategy. For the purposes of this essay, a qualitative analysis was conducted on selected posts that contain generic or content-related references to popular culture and that effectively illustrate the disruptive strategies discussed in the previous chapter. The selection focuses on posts that explicitly or implicitly construct Trump as a superhero/antihero avenger and restorer of the elusive “Golden Age of America.” This essay constitutes part of a broader research project examining Trump’s social media communication.
White House social media posts are analyzed as a proxy for Trump’s communication strategy. The strength of this analysis is augmented by the fact that norm-breaking discourse becomes more disruptive when delivered through an official institutional platform.
The first group of posts selected for this analysis depicts Trump in the role of popular movie heroes—Gladiator, Superman, or a Star Wars jedi—either as their embodiment or by placing him within a familiar fictional setting.
Image 2: Gladiator Trump; posted onJuly 26, 2025
Image 3: Superman Trump, posted on July 11, 2025
Image 4: Star Wars Trump, posted on May 4, 2025
In all three posts, Trump is surrounded with national symbols: an American flag, a bald eagle, or soldiers. The Superman meme posits Trump as the national symbol himself for “hope” and the “American way.” The Gladiator meme draws on cinematic aesthetics and Theodore Roosevelt’s words in the caption to frame Trump as the suffering yet victorious hero. By placing Trump in the colosseum, the meme invites spectators to identify with a familiar Hollywood narrative: the lone hero who, against all odds, defeats the (corrupt) empire. The Star Wars meme associates Trump’s fight against the “Radical Left Lunatics” with the Star Wars mythos of an epic battle between good and evil. The meme thrives on irony: Trump is simultaneously absurd (his bodybuilder body) and serious (his warrior-like face). Audiences can read it as both satire and heroism. Even the choice of a red lightsaber—commonly associated with villains—plays into Trump’s transgressive and antihero portrayal.
A post from September 6, 2025, which situates Trump in the setting of Francis Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now as he declares war on the city of Chicago, functions as a clear illustration of how Trump, alongside the superhero narrative, strategically employs cinematic references to construct a “badass” antihero persona.
Image 5: Trump as Bill Kilgore, posted on September 6, 2025
Trump is here styled as Robert Duvall’s uncompromising character, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore. The caption twists Kilgore’s famous line—“I love the smell of napalm in the morning”—combining it with parodied brutality (“Chipocalypse Now,” helicopter emojis, etc.).Deportations are framed, not as cruelty, but as a macho action movie moment.
In a similar way, blending the “badass” approach with pop-cultural references, the White House account portrayed Border Tsar Tom Homan as the sun-character from the globally popular children’s series Teletubbies.
Image 6: Tom Homan as a Teletubbies’ character, posted on August 10, 2025
This meme reeks of incongruity. The caption “Good Sunday Morning” adds to the irony of a whimsical children’s reference delivering a brutal political statement. This trivializes deportations, as if they were a cheerful everyday occurrence, and normalizes them through playful satire.
Animation has also been deployed to depict Trump as the Pope and alongside Christopher Columbus.
Image 7: Pope Trump, posted on May 3, 2025
Image 8: Donald Trump’s self-parody, posted on April 27, 2025
The Columbus Day post clearly parodies political correctness and liberal critiques of Columbus as a colonial oppressor, whereas the “Pope Trump” meme is more ambiguous. Released during the papal election, it likely served primarily as entertainment but simultaneously asserted Trump’s symbolic supremacy by casting him, comically yet suggestively, as a figure of ultimate sacred authority. The image’s shock value reflects Trump’s pleasure in norm-breaking and fuels debate over its meaning. Both memes are primed for virality—they represent an instantly recognizable visual parody and contain simple message with a strong symbolic punch.
In the register of superhero memes, another remarkable example is the iconic photograph of Trump with his fist raised after the attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania in June 2025, accompanied by the caption: “I was saved by God to make America great again”
Image 9: Trump’s messianic persona, posted on July 13, 2025.
This meme differs from the previous ones that rely on animation and parody. It uses a real photograph and conveys a message grounded in martyr-like pathos. Trump is depicted as having been spared by divine intervention for a historic mission to fight on behalf of God for the nation. Trump’s meme communication thus taps into the religious register, framing him as both resilient leader and messiah. Religious references are among the foundational components of Trump’s communication. The construction of Trump as a “chosen one” corresponds with arguments suggesting that the MAGA movement might be turning into a religion. Although this essay does not engage specifically with the religious register, this topic will be addressed in a forthcoming article as part of the broader research project.
In constructing Trump’s superhero persona and its antithesis, Trump’s team heavily employs what Ruth Wodak and Bernhard Forchner have termed the “fictionalisation of politics.” Originally referring to the representation of politics in fictional media, the concept is here extended to describe the deliberate blurring of boundaries between fiction and political reality. Like other celebrity populists, Trump relies on fictionalization to craft his archetypal hero image. A parallel can be seen in Volodymyr Zelensky, who carried his TV persona from the series Servant of the People into real politics by naming his party after the show, thus transferring the trust and likability of his fictional character to himself as a politician. Trump operates similarly: by fictionalizing his image, he taps into the public’s fascination with heroic archetypes and pop-cultural icons. As John Street notes, citing Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, Trump functions as “a real-life fictional character,” akin to Hulk Hogan.
Avenger and the discourse of restoration
The White House consistently and strategically uses animated memes to promote Trump’s vigilante agenda. The President is portrayed as revenging himself and avenging the nation for all the wrongs committed by the (liberal) elites. As illustrated below, Trump is presented as a mythic avenger, decorated with the patriotic iconography of flags, eagles, and fireworks. The caption “I was the hunted, now I’m the hunter” casts him as a man wronged and persecuted by enemies, who has now risen to turn the tables. The image borrows heavily from movie posters, situating Trump in a world of fictional vigilantes.
Image 10: Trump the vigilante, posted on July 22, 2025
The apparent aim of “Trump the avenger” is to “restore America’s former glory.” The discourse of restoration is reinforced on the White House Instagram profile through captions such as “America is back,” “We got our country back,” “America’s Golden Age,” “America is hot again,” “A new era of American greatness,” and “Renewal of the American Dream,” along with the frequent use of the term “restore”: “restoring government by the people,” “restoring order,” “restoring American airspace sovereignty,” etc. Together, these phrases construct a consistent narrative of national renewal, with Trump as the figure who will lead it.
An intriguing tactic that blends pop culture with this restorative discourse is the use of propaganda imaginaries from both world wars, particularly the retro-propaganda figure of Uncle Sam, who is himself part of global pop culture (Images 11-13).
Image 11: Uncle Sam, posted on August 20, 2025
Image 12: Uncle Sam, posted on August 5, 2025
Image 13: Uncle Sam against illegal immigrants, posted on June 11, 2025
These poster-memes replicate the typography, colors, and visual style of WWI and WWII recruitment posters. Originally, Uncle Sam called on Americans to do their patriotic duty and fight foreign enemies. Here, the same language is redirected toward illegal immigrants. The role of the patriotic citizen is to denounce “foreign invaders” and help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It is hoped that the nation’s cultural memory of existential struggle in the face of the alleged external threat will be reactivated. The memes also implicitly evoke the “Golden Age of America,” not as a concrete historical era, but as a time when America supposedly stood strong against external enemies. The strategy fuses pop-cultural nostalgia with a populist restoration discourse, suggesting that defending the nation from new “invaders”—in this case, immigrants—continues the fight from that imagined heroic past.
Mythical enemy
The final set of memetic posts analyzed here brings together the assemblage of discourses discussed so far with a pop-cultural reading by addressing the mythical enemy, illegal immigrants who are equated with criminals. Through satirical depiction and pop-cultural associations, these posts aim to normalize deportations (Images 14 and 15).
Image 14: Caricaturization of deportations, posted on March 27, 2025
Image 15: Caricaturization of deportations, posted on September 9, 2025
The first image has a manga-inspired, AI-generated illustration style that was experiencing a wave of popularity at the time. The figure of the crying alien felon is exaggerated, infantilized, and caricatured, which is a common tactic for representing enemies in animated films. The manga aesthetic transforms what would otherwise be a politically charged representation into a stylized form of consumable entertainment. The second image parodies Labubu dolls, toys which were also in the midst of surging global demand. The meme hijacks this hype, ensuring its virality, and links state deportation policies to consumer trends. This example illustrates the strategy of the Trump administration to package controversial policies as meme pop-cultural representations which mobilize fandom logics (hype, collectibility, comedy, sharability) for political ends.
Every discursive aspect of the White House’s social media communication is strategically crafted. Just as the features of the reality TV genre permeate Trump’s public performance, so too the characteristics of memes have become a trademark of his and his administration’s digital communication.
This next post illustrates the White House’s memetic strategy of shock and self-scandalization. It parodies the public outrage over the account’s disruptive style. The board in the image reads “oMg, did the wHiTE hOuse reAlLY pOst tHis?,” while the caption asserts: “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say we can’t post banger memes.”
Image 16: WH’s banger memes statement, posted on July 12, 2025
By adopting such vocabulary as “banger memes,” the White House Instagram is aligning itself with youth online culture and the current administration’s badass aesthetic: deliberate, norm-breaking, and delivered with comic irreverence.
Conclusion
This essay situates Trump’s communication within broader debates on celebrity populism, disruptive communication, and pop-cultural recoding of politics. It examines how the White House uses memes to construct Trump’s superhero/antihero persona, to advance avenging and restorative discourses, and to strengthen Donald Trump’s fandom. It argues that Trump’s meme style represents a new synthesis of populist politics and popular culture.
Trump’s communication relies on fictionalization—the blurring of boundaries between politics and fiction—to transform his persona into a consumable entertainment product. The White House social media account functions as a memetic jukebox. Whether represented as Superman, the Pope, or Colonel Kilgore, Trump appears as both savior and outlaw, hero and badass antihero—strong enough to embody national ideals yet rebellious enough to defy the system. His use of pop-culture references and political incorrectness breaks institutional conventions, reinforcing the image of authenticity.
This impression is sustained through self-parody and comic provocation, with memes serving as the perfect medium. Drawing on Hollywood blockbusters, retro-propaganda, and consumer aesthetics, the White House memes channel a discourse of restorative nostalgia: Trump promises to revive a mythic golden age by punishing those blamed for its loss—immigrants, liberal elites, and “globalists.”
In sum, Trump’s White House communication demonstrates how celebrity discourse, authenticity, norm disruption, fictionalization, and restorative populism converge in the digital age. Memes, the generic code of the digital Zeitgeist, become weapons of mass disruption, erasing the boundaries between politics and entertainment and blurring the notion between political reality and its fictionalized construct, rooted in a ‘badass hero’ narrative.
Marijana Grbeša a professor at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Political Science where she teaches courses in media, research methods and strategic communication. She is the Vice-Chair of the Committee of Experts on Online Safety and Empowerment of Content Creators and Users (MSI-eSEC) at the Council of Europe. She has authored over thirty books, chapters and scientific articles on media, political communication, celebrity politics and populism. She is a researcher in the Adria Digital Media Observatory and works as an expert on several media policy projects. She is the editor-in-chief of a distinguished peer-reviewed Media Studies (Medijske studije) journal.
