Judd Apatow explained his theory that Donald Trump’s “dumbest memes” are actually orchestrated moves by “psychiatrists and think tanks” that are working to make Trump’s critics “lose hope.”
“My feeling is that it’s always more complicated than we know,” the comedy director and producer explained on the On with Kara Swisher podcast. “I don’t think this memeification is based on someone’s instinct. I think there’s think tanks and psychological studies” behind Trump’s scandalized social media posts, he continued, “because it has been proven to work as propaganda.”
“And we take it like, ‘Oh, he’s being crazy. And I can’t believe he said that, or I can’t believe he posted that. It’s totally planned,” he asserted. “I think there’s literally like psychiatrists figuring out, how do you make people lose hope? How do you make people think that they can’t win a fight?”
Trump’s memes have only grown more “crazy” with the advent of AI, which has helped him threaten to stay in office for 20 more years, shine a spotlight on the blue cities he wages war with, or launch bizarre insults at Democratic lawmakers.
The meme the president posted that depicted him as the pope, or the one that showed him as Kilgore from Apocalypse Now as he bombs Chicago, and the edited video that showed House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero and mustache, were just some of his wildest internet messages before he posted the AI-created video of himself flying a plane and dumping feces on New York City’s No Kings protestors.
Apatow said the Democrats are sitting ducks in the face of Trump’s schoolyard humor: “They’re afraid to take the comedic risk, that it’ll be taken the wrong way. So as a result, they seem like they’re covering, like they’re controlling their expression, and Trump is just pure expression.”
The inclination to play it safe doesn’t work against Trump’s lack of inhibition, he explained. “You look even more full of it when, when people can see your eyes thinking, I don’t wanna get in trouble, I don’t wanna get in trouble, I don’t wanna get in trouble,” Apatow said. “And then you get a real muted version of yourself, and people feel like there’s something to not be trusted in that self-censorship.”
That ineffective response leaves plenty of room for Trump’s “propaganda” to operate at full capacity. “He can say the worst things that were put up, the dumbest memes, and everyone’s like, well that doesn’t mean anything,” Apatow added. “But it means something if your healthcare disappears. It means something if you’re at work and you’re from Mexico and you’re a legal immigrant and they put you in a camp.”
Trump wins the narrative by “flooding the zone,” Apatow went on, but he said not giving in to “hopelessness” is how citizens can push back.
“Even though there’s millions of people on the street, Trump poops on them, and it’s supposed to make everyone feel sad,” he said. “Well, no one listened. So that’s why it’s important for everybody to just continue to fight, to speak up, to find ways to support candidates and organizations you believe in, in spite of the fact that people wanna humiliate you and make you feel hopeless.”
For more, listen to Judd Apatow on The Last Laugh podcast.
