President Trump’s way of communicating has wormed itself deep into American culture. His speeches, interactions with the press and social media posts have inspired countless memes and impersonations from both fans and critics. But according to the linguist and author Adam Aleksic, these memes are now becoming part of how we all speak. Aleksic, also known by his alter ego Etymology Nerd, joins the New York Times Opinion editor Meher Ahmad and the Opinion columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom to explore what that means for how we think.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Meher Ahmad: My name is Meher Ahmad. I’m an editor for the New York Times Opinion section.
We talk a lot about how Trump has changed — some would say defined — our politics over the last 10 years, but he is also leaving an enormous mark on our culture. Like it or not, he’s changing us right down to the way that we speak, and in turn, how we think.
I’m here with linguist Adam Aleksic — the author of “Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language,” who recently wrote an essay on the topic for Times Opinion, and Opinion columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom, a sociologist who is a keen observer of the intersection of culture and politics.
Adam, Tressie, welcome.
Adam Aleksic: Hi.
Tressie McMillan Cottom: It’s a real pleasure.
Ahmad: Before we jump into the finer points of Trump and language, I wanted to ask each of you when you first noticed what an effective communicator Trump is. I think a lot of critics easily dismiss him as a speaker because he kind of breaks all the rules of public speaking. He goes on long wanders, doesn’t complete his sentences, and yet he’s magnetic to watch and listen to.
Tressie, when was that moment for you?
Cottom: I grew up with Donald Trump on reality television, like a lot of people. I didn’t expect him to fail at communicating with people. I also tend to pay a lot more attention to everyday politics and how people speak about it in layman’s terms.
So, while he may not have sounded presidential to those of us who have a very clear idea of what that is supposed to sound like, I thought: Well, but he does sound like people who talk about politics at the bus stop.
He sounds like the way we talk about politics when we’re still just learning and developing a facility for political speech.
I always thought that he was quite effective. That is not the same thing as being good. It is not necessarily the same thing as being presidential, for sure, to Adam’s point in his essay.
But I always thought that he was an effective communicator.
Aleksic: Meher, you mentioned there are rules to what it means to be an effective communicator. I think those rules are entirely in our head — or rather, the elite population’s head, as we judge correct grammar and prose.
Trump does not follow those rules, but to most people, that is actually a sign of relatability. That is an effective communication tactic.
Effective communication also means talking in ways that work for certain mediums. When he first really hit the scene presidentially in 2015, 2016, for that campaign, he was very good at using TV as a medium — which is to just get people’s attention so that you’ll be aired in more news segments, so you’re constantly generating more news.
He was very effective at communicating in a way in which he would show up way more in the news than any other candidate in the 2016 primary. So I think that was the first time I started thinking about that.
Ahmad: Adam, in your guest essay, you made the case that Trump’s language is changing how we speak. There’s turns of phrase in the essay that I almost didn’t realize Trump had popularized, like “many such cases.” And there are many such cases.
What are some of the other ones that you were able to identify and track?
Aleksic: “Many people are saying this.”
I hear my friends say things like “sad” as an interjection that literally comes out of a Donald Trump tweet.
“Fake news” is a term that at least was popularized by him, and “believe me” at the end of a sentence.
But I think the biggest impact was his phrasal templates, which are kind of sentence skeletal structures where you can sub in certain words.
So, “Thank you, X. Very cool.” “Make X Y again.” “This has been the worst X in the history of Y, maybe ever.” And these are all place holders for you to put in your own memes or words, or apply them to new situations, which lets them live a life beyond Trump.
Same with all those words. They’re all adaptable to new situations.
Ahmad: What is it about those specific words or phrases that resonates and is able to penetrate so deeply into our culture?
Aleksic: There’s a few things going on. I think the adaptability is a really important point to pay attention to because the way memes spread is by applying them to new contexts. If it’s just one context, it goes viral that one time, and then it doesn’t spread.
So it needs to be moldable to new situations, and linguistically, that means those Mad-Libs-style phrasal templates are fantastic.
Also, when you say “many people are saying this” or “many such cases,” you can apply that to literally any time multiple people are saying something — that’s a very easily adaptable meme, and it’s a funny turn of phrase.
So that’s another point: It’s not just adaptability; it needs to be memetically fit — which is a nebulous phrase, but to be funny in the online medium, things spread usually in the form of jokes, in the form of online memes, and meme in that sense is just a funny internet kind of ha-ha moment.
It’s funny when Donald Trump speaks strangely, and we know he speaks more strangely than other presidents. There was that study from the researchers at the University of Chicago where they proved that he has a demonstrably unique syntactic style.
That’s kind of what we were just talking about with the informal speech and the way he doesn’t talk presidentially. In fact, that could be quite good for him in this day and age.
Ahmad: Tressie, are there any Trumpisms that stand out to you as particularly interesting?
Cottom: I also think that the “sad” one jumps out at me quite a bit. One of the things that Donald Trump uses very well, as Adam points out, is humor.
We have really struggled with this in polite, elite discourse, where we associate humor with being a low form of communication, but humor resonates deeply with a cross section of people, and especially among younger people.
I have thought a lot about and written some about how much we underestimated the power of humor in being able to become, as Adam points out, memetic, right?
One of the things that Donald Trump does is he doesn’t just use the medium, he really does embody the medium. He is the internet. He embodies what makes the internet so powerful, and he has used the communication infrastructure — how we joke, how we like to be ironic, which I would also point out to people that the use of irony has made Donald Trump very popular, not just with conservatives but with liberals.
Liberals really lean into ironic humor, and Donald Trump just provides so much of that. He’s almost entrepreneurial in how he will just keep throwing out these templates, right? He’ll actually throw out about 500 and maybe only 10 stick, but if no other politician is throwing out any, then 10 seems huge.
So I think anything that has that ironic, humorous bent tends to stand out because you don’t actually need to know why the content was originally funny. It only needs to be funny in the context where you apply it. And Donald Trump is very, very good at supplying us with those. Whatever the actual meme is, the humor beneath it should resonate with people.
Aleksic: Yeah, there is something so important to comedy. You look at what these algorithms were doing for this second election where he got re-elected — algorithms played a much stronger role in the election. The first time was more of a TV-based election, and this is now.
The algorithms are engagement optimization algorithms, and what that means is if people are engaging with it, it will go more viral. And things that people engage with include memes, jokes — they don’t engage with boring, monotone, elite discourse. I’m sorry.
Cottom: That one hurts, Adam. [Laughs.]
Ahmad: There are a lot of ways in which, like Trump himself, the language that he uses ends up moving into the internet sphere, but there’s also the memeing of his actions. So Trump dancing or Trump as a Sith Lord, but other aspects of him that also inspire virality — like that weekend when many people on Twitter were saying he was dead.
There’s some aspect of this too, I think, where Trump is funny, whether intentionally or not. Some people don’t find him funny. I do find myself laughing often — either at him or with him in some cases, just because of the way that he mocks the people around him or in front of him.
A lot of that funniness, though, seems to come from a place of authenticity, where he just seems like an unfiltered person compared to so many who are in the public eye — definitely politicians, but even celebrities, where so much of their public appearances are filtered through a lens of how they will be perceived by a wider audience. And it just seems like Trump doesn’t care.
Tressie, do you feel that way also? Do you think he’s funny?
Cottom: Yes, I probably think Donald Trump is funniest when he is not trying to be funny. His actual attempts at jokes are, I actually think, quite sad. He does not understand the structure of a joke, because he doesn’t have the self-awareness.
I think that’s why he doesn’t do well at something like the White House press dinner, but he does great in a presser where he can do the sort of free-flowing repartee with the media. He uses the media as a stand-in for a live audience.
I saw him many times on the campaign trail, for example, and he could not do a 10-minute tight set to save his life. But he can generate this organic call-and-response with an audience that organically and spontaneously produces these moments of levity and humor.
Now, I will say, a lot of that humor is punching down, right? It is cruel.
I think it appeals then to this effective desire of extreme emotions, and cruel humor also feels a little transgressive to people, especially if they think that the culture had moved so far toward being safe and being politically correct — so there’s a certain amount of transgression that his humor gives the audience permission to dabble in that I don’t think would work if he was actually trying to be funny.
I tend to find him most funny — and not in a way where it weakens him, which is what we tend to think will happen — that if he is funny, then he’s less powerful. He has figured out how to use humor in the context of presidential power and how to use one to further the other. I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything quite like that.
So he calls the heads of state into the White House and he effectively uses them as a patsy to get off his jokes, right? You see Zelensky sitting there across from him, totally befuddled. You can see him wondering: What is happening right now?
And I think the only person who understands what’s happening in this exchange would be someone who has produced a comedy show.
He was using a politician on the global stage as a comedic foil for his jokes and playing that to the audience. So, again, it’s not that the humor is lighthearted and it’s not that I enjoy that he is funny, but I can acknowledge that he’s using humor for a political purpose. And I don’t think we’ve ever seen humor used as a political speech act this way before.
Aleksic: I should also note that transgressive content generates more comments. People saying, “Oh, I like this” or “I don’t like this,” or responding to it or making riffs on it — all of those count as engagement on social media algorithms, which pushes messages further.
Emotional content goes more viral, things that draw your gaze whether or not it’s good or bad — social media algorithms don’t show you what’s good. They show you what can keep you hooked in as a viewer.
In the same way you might turn your head to look at a traffic accident, you might keep watching when you’re looking at the president of the United States talking to the president of Ukraine this way. That’s something you can’t look away from.
This metric of attention is actually the defining feature of what makes the video get attention. It’s kind of circular, but Trump really does play into those things, knowingly or not.
Ahmad: So if he changes the way that we communicate, does that mean that Trump has also changed the way that we think?
Aleksic: I think so. This is about the reality we’re building and constructing in our heads. Fundamentally, what these algorithms and A.I. do is: There’s an input — something crazy happens, we don’t know what it’s called, the black box, not even the engineers know what happens — and then there’s an output.
There’s a lot of opportunities for that output to be different than reality itself. It always will be, in fact, because the input is going to be a map of the territory. It’s never going to be the full picture.
Ultimately, what we see is not reality. We are trained to assume this is reality. The algorithm is presented as: This is good.
There’s likes on the side of the video, but the likes only reflect the engagement. They don’t reflect actual human confirmation that we all do actually like this. But you see that, it’s legitimized, then you construct this notion that it is good and you build your reality based on what you’re seeing, what you think is real.
There’s a growing perception gap in the United States, for example, that we are consistently overestimating how extreme we think other people’s political beliefs are. And I think that’s because algorithms are showing you a bimodal distribution of political beliefs.
They’re going to show you A.O.C. and they’re going to show you Marjorie Taylor Greene because those people are going to go more viral. They’re not going to show you my congressman from where I grew up, Albany, N.Y., Paul Tonko — he’s boring. I’m sorry.
In the same way that the lead discourse is boring and Trump is exciting.
Cottom: Bring back boring politicians, by the way. I’m in favor, Adam.
Aleksic: You’re going to have to use a different medium. I don’t think the medium of social media is at all disposed to reward boring.
Ahmad: Tressie, you wrote a column in August that commented on how Trump favors giving decrees via social media. So how are the platforms themselves shaping how his message kind of gets out?
Cottom: So one of the things that I think Trump does very well — and I’ve even talked about how he is a meme, he is memetic — is his entire mode of engagement and the way that he uses communication to shape reality, to make his policy seem inevitable, that is the stick and the carrot in his political approach.
So what he’ll do, for example, is he’ll get on Truth Social and he will issue a decree, like a great king. Sometimes that is also partnered with an executive order, which I would argue is like the bureaucratic cousin of the social media post. It has a questionable amount of enforcement, but what it does do is it resets the bounds of the discourse of the conversation.
Suddenly we are talking about an executive order coming that is going to do X. Now, it may not be legal. Sometimes it’s not even feasible. There’s no bureaucratic means for something like what Donald Trump wants to happen.
But what he can do, sometimes, is he can use the pronouncement to shape people’s understanding of what is possible and therefore probable.
What he knows how to do is to shape our understanding of what is next and what is coming by saying it has already happened.
He forecloses on the possibilities of all of the politics that go into enacting some new policy change. He is overextending the powers of the executive office, but mostly because he creates an audience for what he wants, and then the audience makes it real.
This is Adam’s point. We understand what is possible and what is happening by the language we have. And when he can so capture our language, how we now even talk about people, then he also owns what we think should happen next.
And very often it aligns with what he wants to happen next. So I think he just uses it as a way to shape his politics. And the fact that we don’t quite take that seriously actually just makes it more powerful.
Aleksic: Everything you say shifts the Overton window, the range of acceptable discourse in a society. The Overton window is just your idea of what other people think is OK for you to say, and you will not say things if it doesn’t seem like it’s OK to say.
And the more you normalize a certain type of language, a certain type of rhetoric, a certain type of idea, the more people will talk about it. And because social media algorithms are amplifying extreme things, I think the Overton window is widening. I think there are more acceptable crazy things to be said than there were in 2008.
There is a transient nature to our discourse, which is incredibly meme-driven. These memes are ephemeral. They come and they go, and you have to tap into the current culture moment. It’s all very vibes-forward and it’s less fact-based.
It’s very important to pay attention to the media scholar Harold Innis, who talked about time-biased versus space-biased communication. Space-biased communication is stuff that fills up a lot of space immediately and can go very far, but doesn’t stick around for a long time, and time-biased communication is oral traditions, books, stuff that will stick around for longer, but fewer people are maybe going to read it.
And I think both of these have their own problems, right?
Time-biased communication can be controlled by gatekeepers of how we’re talking to each other. Space-biased communication is great for virally communicating, but it has that real problem that there is no cultural record. It is moment after moment, feeling after feeling.
The way we engage with the internet is driven by these feelings that come and go rapidly, and the moment you pause, we’ve already moved on. So that’s why I just really strongly think we should be mixing our forms of media.
I don’t think we should be ignoring the algorithm. I think this is where a lot of culture is emanating from right now, and I don’t like the reaction of completely going off phones, because then you just leave behind that part of our society right now.
I think we should be mixing these forms of media. I think we should be maintaining an institutional historical record through time-biased communication, and at the same time communicating broadly, subversively harnessing these tools for space-biased communication.
Ahmad: We kind of touched on this, the Trump of it all, and his particular ability to navigate these various platforms and modes of communication.
We touched a little bit, I think — maybe not mentioned explicitly — the degree to which the left, the Democratic Party struggles to do the same thing.
But there’s one prominent example that’s coming out as a foil of this, which is the New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
He has cut through a lot of the discourse with a really similar ease in navigating various platforms. He’s rode various waves of virality, has created memes of his own.
So, I’m curious what you guys make of him in the context of this conversation. Tressie?
Cottom: Yeah, this is fascinating, because I think we attribute a lot of these distinctions to generational differences: Oh, well, Mamdani is born of the media. And I think there is a lot to that, but I always like to say to people, “Well, Donald Trump was not, Donald Trump is a boomer, and he has an extreme amount of facility with these media contexts.” So, I don’t think that is entirely generational differences.
I would actually say Mamdani reminds me more of an iteration of Obama, in the sense that he has an extreme amount of appreciation for the communication tools. But my sense is that he is merging the bureaucratic forms.
He still has political speechwriters, he still has media makers, who are taking what I suspect is his natural facility for these modes of communication and fitting it into a hybrid of today’s new politician.
And I am sorry to say this: I do not think that that is the same thing as what Donald Trump does, which is he iterates the medium itself. He is changing the internet and becoming and channeling the internet in a way that I’m not sure that Mamdani does.
I think Mamdani is very good at using those tools to cut through, as you point out, to people who are not deeply embedded in internet cultures, who do not know the many-layered contextual histories of things that go viral — and he’s a shortcut for a lot of those people.
He’s using social media context in a way that, I think, feels safer and more familiar to those of us who do not spend a lot of our time on the dark web with edgelords.
Aleksic: I’m completely with Tressie on this. I think if you want the closest example to Donald Trump on the left, it would be Gavin Newsom, who is directly imitating Donald Trump.
Cottom: That’s what I was thinking. That’s what I was thinking, too.
Aleksic: He’s embodying the medium. Mamdani, if you actually look at what he says in his messaging, he does not use slang words. He does not use internet memes.
However, he does adopt the visual semiotic language of how you communicate on these platforms. He emerges from water dripping wet to talk about rent freezes, and this is a visual hook which the users of social media will recognize as the start of a viral video. They are socially conditioned into continuing to watch this video because we have an expectation of the kind of video we’re going to watch.
He plays into those very well. He has aesthetics, he has graphics, motion graphics that work very well.
But Mamdani, actually, I think, is under a lot of pressure to sound like a regular politician, to use formal language.
Cottom: Exactly.
Aleksic: And he wears that suit. He presents like a very articulate, very educated person, not playing into the memes because that would be very bad for his brand as a young brown man.
Cottom: Can I just say real quick, Adam, the idea of how the other politicians are mirroring Trump is, I think, one of the more fascinating ones. Because you see it on the left and right and I find it fascinating how many of them try and then fail because they have so much ego going in, thinking: Oh, he’s not smart. This is so easy.
And it’s actually not. It is its own facility with language. And I think it’s fascinating to watch politicians try to capture it. And to your point, I think Gavin Newsom so far, he is the only one who gets it.
Ahmad: Tressie, what do you think about Gavin Newsom? What’s the reason it’s hitting for him and not for others?
Cottom: That’s a great question. There’s so much shaping of politicians, like you pointed out earlier, the same with any public figure or celebrity, and it is very difficult to break out of that self-awareness.
One of the things that Donald Trump has is he has no self-awareness. That’s why he feels authentic to so many people. He seems not to have any awareness of how people are receiving him, only that they respond to him. And I believe that Gavin Newsom has the same thing — that while he had been very politically sculpted, he’s certainly in the mode of a traditional politician — what he is demonstrating is that he perhaps has less self-awareness, less self-seriousness to constrain how willing he is to sort of jump into these linguistic waters.
It also might help that he is doing it as offense and not playing defense, right? He isn’t having to defend his political office. He isn’t having, to the point Adam made about Mamdani, to conform to stereotypes and archetypes about race or gender, et cetera. So, he also has the same amount of embodied privilege that Donald Trump has.
You get a straight white man who looks like a politician to Americans, and he’s got some room to play around with being less self-aware than other politicians can.
Aleksic: I’m going to push back on the less self-aware thing. I think Newsom’s speech works because it fits into the aesthetic of trolling. It still works because all caps is memetically fit for the medium. But the reason people find it funny and the reason it works is because he’s seen as constantly, subversively, almost absurdly making fun of someone in a style that has been popular on the internet since the early days of 4chan.
Cottom: Yeah, he’s trolling.
Ahmad: It’s interesting: If I was to imagine 200 years from now and someone blows the dust off of a Trump tweet, we can always tell it’s a Trump tweet. The combination of words, his syntax is so unique, and I don’t think that’s true of a Mamdani or even of an Obama, that if you were to read that statement just on its own you’d say, “Oh, I know exactly who wrote this” — which I think is true of almost everything that Trump puts out there.
Cottom: You know, as a writer and one who appreciates the craft of writing, I think I always had to appreciate that Donald Trump has voice. And voice is not something that you can necessarily train people to have. Certainly, training can help.
But whether you love it or hate it, Donald Trump’s voice is distinctive, and to your point, you cannot misidentify it. In many ways, Donald Trump, I think, will end up being bigger than the American presidency.
How much he transforms it in perpetuity remains to be seen, but I think he will have been larger than the presidency.
And this part is the stunning part. As somebody has always believed in the theories of communication and certainly believes in the theories that language shapes the world, seeing it play out in real time and seeing how much language opens up both modes of possibility and then forecloses on other modes of possibility, seeing that wielded with the executive office of the most powerful country on Earth is beyond anything I could have imagined possible just 10 short years ago.
That is distinctive and unique to Donald Trump. Love him or hate him, he’s got voice, and as it turns out, voice is really, really important.
Ahmad: Well, Adam, Tressie. This has been a really, really interesting conversation. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.
Aleksic: Of course.
Cottom: It was a real pleasure.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud and Isaac Jones. Original music by Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2022. She is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow. @tressiemcphd
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