Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, and Posting as Politics
On June 24, at 6:50 A.M., Donald Trump posted a message on Truth Social that might otherwise have been reserved for a diplomatic cable or at least a highly secure phone line: “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS . . . IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION.” He signed the post, continuing in all caps, “DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES” (as if, in a post from his personal account, on a social network that he created, there could be any doubt). This was after he had bombed nuclear sites in Iran, on June 21st, an action that he also trumpeted on Truth Social, and it was after he had, more or less unilaterally, announced a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, theoretically bringing Israel’s recent attacks on Iran’s nuclear-development program to a halt. So far, the ceasefire has largely held, thanks in part, perhaps, to Trump’s continued real-time posting about the conflict, a rare show of focus from the scattered President. On June 27th, Trump was still posting, now to complain about Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s boasts about the war’s outcome: “I SAVED HIM FROM A VERY UGLY AND IGNOMINIOUS DEATH, and he does not have to say, ‘THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP!’ ”
Discussing military secrets, undertaking diplomatic negotiations, making economic threats—no aspect of governing seems too high level for Trump not to publish it on the internet. (In the posts about Khamenei, Trump claimed that Israel had been preparing one last major attack, before he stepped in.) The posts seem to constitute not only the broadcasting of policy decisions but, more alarmingly, the decisions themselves. Social media isn’t just politicized; it is the politics. On June 19th, Trump said that he would reserve two weeks in which to decide whether to bomb Iran; he took action much faster than that and, once the bombing was done, he put the news about it on Truth Social immediately, the way one might post a photo of a just-cooked meal on Instagram, while it’s still steaming. Comparing a bombing campaign to a proud food gram might seem to minimize the act of violence, but such is the effect of Trump’s posts: they compress world-shaking events into a few hundred characters. In his first term as President, Trump was known for using Twitter to broadcast his ire. In 2018, he tweeted that his “Nuclear Button” was bigger than Kim Jong Un’s. But Trump is now using Truth Social even more ferociously than he used Twitter: the Washington Post recently found that the volume of his posts in the past months was three times higher than it was in the same period of his first term. The article labelled Trump an “influencer-in-chief.”
Politics have become markedly more online since Trump lost the 2020 election. The popularity of his supporters on YouTube, TikTok, and podcasts helped push him to victory in 2024. Atomized video clips have now become not just units of viral content but the digital lingua franca, helping to build politicians’ identities and communicate their ideas. A clip of Trump cursing, off the cuff, to reporters about Israel and Iran (“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing”) is just one recent example. Several members of the second Trump Administration draw their political philosophies from the depths of internet discourse, most prominently Vice-President J. D. Vance, who follows X accounts linked to white nationalism, right-wing extremism, and race science, and who engages in online fights with his detractors on the platform. Vance’s own posts aren’t quite as dramatic as Trump’s—his account mostly features bland praise for his boss’s decisions—but Vance is still a wellspring of material for political posting. Ever since the truculent meeting between Trump, Vance, and the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, in February, infantilized or bloated distortions of Vance’s face have been a popular meme, defining the digital brand of the Administration, at least for its opponents.
The Vance meme has become a political flash point in itself. In June, a twenty-one-year-old Norwegian tourist named Mads Mikkelsen was stopped at Newark Airport and interrogated about his travel plans and contacts in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents demanded that he unlock his phone and give it to them; on it, they found a meme of Vance with a bald head and childlike features. Mikkelsen was denied entry. He claimed that this was, at least in part, because they had found the meme; D.H.S. officials later disputed his story and said the reason they had declined to let Mikkelsen enter the country was that he had admitted to drug use, seemingly referencing a photo they’d discovered of him holding a pipe. Still, the justification is unconvincing: the meme was so politically potent that it had become functionally illegal, and the news of Mikkelsen’s ejection only propelled it further. Politics are so digital at this point that the images saved on your phone are seen as coterminous with your personal beliefs.
If what you post is what you believe, then unmediated posting is key to political success. Trump’s posts seem to be so unplanned that they must be authentic—such erratic capitalization couldn’t be workshopped. While Trump drops posts like ordnance from a fighter jet, Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, has been embracing a different form of posting as politics. The thirty-three year-old New York State assembly member posts in accordance with his age, putting out short-form videos on TikTok and Instagram that are composed but informal, with a sense of sprezzatura that remains perhaps the last symbol of authenticity on social media. Mamdani’s videos of his walk down the length of Manhattan resemble improvised man-on-the-street documentaries; one shakily intimate clip of Mamdani running into his mother, the director Mira Nair, has more than two million views on TikTok. His social-media presence also gains momentum from collaborations with some of the most fluent of digital-native creators, including the New York podcaster and writer the Kid Mero and the writer and model Emily Ratajkowski, and the account Pop Crave.
Mamdani’s posting style emerges from the very latest generation of successful digital content: video series, or miniature TV shows, broadcast online. “Subway Takes” is a popular social-media talk show in which various subjects, from niche comedians to celebrities and major politicians, offer up an unorthodox opinion to the show’s host, Kareem Rahma, while sitting on the New York City subway; the show has more than a million followers on both Instagram and TikTok. Many of Mamdani’s videos are produced by a creative agency called Melted Solids, whose co-founder, Anthony DiMieri, co-produces “Subway Takes.” Fans of the show will find the campaign’s raw visual language and cinéma-vérité documentation—a sharp contrast to the Kamala Harris Presidential campaign’s somewhat distant, meme-heavy social-media strategy—familiar. The strategy, DiMieri recently told Adweek, is about “people spending time with him through the medium of video and seeing how authentic he actually is.” In other words, it’s about posting as often and as directly as possible, in the most real-time medium available. Mamdani could turn out to be an influencer-in-chief, too. But perhaps every future politician will have to be.
Mamdani’s self-broadcasting is less aggressive and more uplifting than Trump’s; he seduces the voting audience rather than commanding it. He identifies as a socialist, embraces a populist appeal, and calls for a shakeup to political hierarchies, yet his message essentially preserves the high-mindedness and egalitarianism of Democratic Party ideals—appealing to common humanity rather than to political divisions. Democrats have struggled to create coherent anti-Trump messaging during his second Administration. Their latest attempt was an uninspiring invitation-only Pride concert at the Kennedy Center, in Washington, D.C., which was meant to demonstrate resistance to Trump’s occupation of the culture venue, but which ended up as more of a punch line. (The event included some anti-Trump edits to “Les Misérables” lyrics.) Mamdani has channelled a sense of hope for something different. Whether this hope can withstand the compromises and calculations of actual governance will be one test of his—and perhaps the Democratic Party’s—digital-first future. They will have to follow through on their posting. ♦
