A substantial share of the phrases in this collection originates on Twitter, where Donald Trump’s online activity produced a wide range of recurring expressions and improvised slogans. Many of these phrases quickly circulated beyond their original posts and were taken up by online communities, where they became familiar reference points associated with a particular style of political communication.

For this project, we selected a subset of the most widely circulated and generative examples: phrases that gained traction as jokes, reaction formats, or reusable memetic templates for commentary and interpretation. Their continued circulation depends less on precise meaning than on their ease of reuse and reinterpretation across different contexts and visual forms.

Each tweet is treated as a point of reference within a wider network of reactions, adaptations, and reinterpretations, illustrating how online publics engage with political authority, spectacle, and humour as events unfold. By tracing the development and circulation of these memes, the project examines how political discourse moves through image-based forms of expression and contributes to shared meanings, orientations, and emotional responses within networked publics.

Collected with Zeeschuimer, analyzed with 4CAT, and visualized with Flourish, the collection follows how these expressions moved across platforms and contributed to the creation of images, memes, in-jokes, and ecurring narrative frames. By foregrounding the most prominent and memefied Trumpisms, the collection reveals the feedback loop between political rhetoric and participatory culture, illustrating how presidential language is absorbed, reshaped, and promptly circulated as part of contemporary digital culture.

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and some, I assume, are good people

big deals

bring me the poison

Calling for a complete and total shutdown of [x] until we can figure out what’s going on

concepts of a plan

covfefe

Twitter/X · 2017 · Misspelling

Don’t we folks

everybody transgender

everything’s computer

fake news

fortunately or unfortunately

haters and losers

Honey, I need to fix this.

It’s called we do a little [trolling]

low energy

low IQ person

Many [people] are saying

many such cases

nobody knows [jobs] like I do

nuclear button

open the schools!!!

sad!

she was a miserable woman

shithole country

so true!

stable genius

stop the count!

thank you, [Kanye], very cool

they’re not sending their best

tired of winning

unpresidented

Twitter/X · 2016 · Misspelling

we’re going to [x] like nobody has [xed] before

we’re looking into it

(win) bigly

wrong!

you’re telling me now for the first time

what’s going on with my “boys” and, in some cases, “gals?”

worst trade deal in the history of trade deals

“the most [insert subject matter adverb, adjective, etc.] maybe ever”

Header image: Logan Voss on Unsplash