The internet can make you feel like you have all of this control over the political Wait, sorry. How does this — wait. Did I just lose? “Internetting with Amanda Hess.” (ALL IMAGES SOURCED FROM THE INTERNET) “Pokemon Go to the polls.” Hillary Clinton was famously one of the least charismatic politicians. “I’m just chillin’ in Cedar Rapids.” But on the internet, her image took on a life of its own. It’s almost as if Hillary’s fans breathed charisma into her on social media. Hillary often seemed at her most charismatic in GIF form, when her most charming moments could be put on endless loop and passed around as totems of her character. Meanwhile, Hillary’s detractors were working in the opposite direction, isolating moments that made her look deranged, ugly and sick. This is political candidate as avatar. We’re no longer just analyzing how candidates express themselves. We want to express ourselves through them. On the internet, our support of candidates is being encoded through these moments where they seem to represent us, not as actual political representatives voting for our interests, but as people acting how we’d like to imagine ourselves acting. “I’m reclaiming my time, yeah.” Memes put a new twist on the old idea of charismatic authority in politics. Charismatic leaders used to imbue themselves with mythos, claiming to possess special qualities and cults of personality around themselves. But on the internet, a lot of that work has been transferred to citizens who take their leaders’ tics and blow them up into superhuman form. And as they do it, they’re creating really strong tribal and emotional ties around those personalities. If you make a meme about a candidate and then they become president, it can feel like you created a piece of the presidential persona, like a part of you is president. Memes give us the power to build leaders’ personalities or destroy them. We used to talk about gaffes. The idea seems quaint now. “Grab and grab and grab.” “Grab and grab.” There’s no longer any fixed idea of a candidate to be disrupted by a gaffe. “Such a nasty woman.” Our conception of politicians is now made up of sets of competing polarized memes. Any moment can be manipulated into a positive or negative, depending on your allegiance. And because memes can morph to accommodate almost any position it’s easier than e ver to take candidates’ images and twist them to our own ends. Facts don’t matter to memes. The meme of this confused blond lady started out as pictures of a Brazilian soap actress contemplating her character’s inner turmoil in jail. But when people started superimposing math equations on her face, she turned into a symbol of confusion or deep conspiratorial calculations. The Babadook was a horrifying movie villain before he was pushed in front of a rainbow flag and restyled as a fabulous gay icon. Because memes don’t need to grapple with reality, they spread a lot faster than typical forms of political speech. And in presidential politics, we’ve never seen anyone benefit from this more “You are fake news.” than Donald Trump. Trump had no clear ideology, the vaguest sketches of ideas, a bottomless thirst for attention, and a flair for drama: the perfect base for endless meming. His campaign rallies became like incubators for ideas with viral potential. Think about the defining meme of Trumpism. “We need to build a wall.” “We need to build a wall.” It never made any practical sense that the United States would build a 2,000-mile wall and that Mexico would pay for it, but “A big, beautiful wall.” Any time reality tried to get in the way, Trump would double down on the meme. “10 feet higher.” “The wall just got 10 feet higher.” For his biggest fans, Trump himself is the ultimate meme. They’ve become so invested in promoting his persona that his promises have become almost irrelevant, like outdated versions of a meme that have been replaced by the next amusing thing. That’s the seductive danger of democracy as meme. It can make us feel like we have more personal control over a politician, but it’s the politician who is seizing the real power, becoming immune to criticism and less accountable to us. Next time on “Internetting” — Why beauty apps make you feel ugly.