Donald Trump

2011public figureclassic

Published August 19, 2026

Donald Trump is an American real estate developer, reality TV host, and politician whose brash Twitter feed and rally speeches turned him into a heavily-memed public figure across the 2010s. Everything from the 2013 'Wow' recursive tweet chain to his 2015 El Chapo Twitter beef to a 2017 account blackout kept him at the center of viral internet moments.

trump memespolitical satire memestwitter memespresidential memesreality tv origin memes

Overview

Donald Trump, born June 14, 1946, is an American real estate developer and reality TV host best known for NBC's The Apprentice, whose @realDonaldTrump account launched March 18, 2009 powered his transition from tabloid celebrity to a heavily-memed political fixture and three U.S. presidential runs, winning in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, losing to Joe Biden in 2020, and winning again against Kamala Harris in 20243.

The Trump-as-meme story runs through his tweets, his rally speeches, and his gossip-column beefs. USA Today/Gallup put him at number six on its annual most-admired-men list in December 2011, tied at one percent of the vote8. That year Trump had already made headlines for considering a presidential run and briefly offering to host a Republican primary debate, on top of long-running public spats with multiple media personalities8.

Origin & Background

Platform
Twitter
Creator
Donald Trump
Date
2011

Trump's shift from tabloid celebrity toward internet meme accelerated in October 2012, during his stint as a Mitt Romney campaign surrogate against President Barack Obama. On October 24, 2012, Trump released a YouTube video promising to donate $5 million to a charity of Obama's choice if the president would hand over his college applications, college records, and passport records by Halloween6. HuffPost dismissed the stunt as basically Trump asking Obama to bail him out of his own conspiracy theories, and Obama laughed it off the following night on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno by joking that his feud with Trump went all the way back to their childhood in Kenya, saying they used to have "constant run-ins on the soccer field"7.

How It Spread

The "Wow" chain of February 2013 was one of the first viral games built entirely around a Trump tweet. 9to5Mac senior editor Mark Gurman replied "Wow." with a link to a Trump post trashing ABC's Shark Tank while hyping The Apprentice's ratings on February 25, 2013, and Arizona student Erik Schmidt tweeted "Wow" back at Gurman with a link, kicking off a recursion that Twitter users kept chaining until The Verge traced patient zero on February 281. Gurman told the outlet he "didn't intentionally start the chain" and had spotted himself at the end of it by accident when he first clicked through1.

Trump's June 16, 2015 campaign kickoff at Trump Tower produced another round of viral clips, most notably his line about Mexico "sending" rapists, criminals, and drug dealers across the border2. At a South Carolina rally on July 21, 2015, Trump read out Republican Senator Lindsey Graham's private cell number and encouraged supporters to "try it," after Graham had called him a "jackass" the previous day, prompting Gawker to publish Trump's own mobile number on August 3 under the headline "Call Donald Trump's Cell Phone and Ask Him About His Important Ideas"3.

That same summer, drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman escaped from Mexico's Altiplano maximum-security prison on the night of July 11, 2015, last seen in the showers of his cell block before officers noticed him missing5. Trump seized on the escape as ammo for his border talking points, and an account allegedly belonging to one of Guzman's sons fired back with a threat that translated roughly as "Keep fucking around and I'm gonna make you swallow your bitch words"2. Trump contacted the FBI's Manhattan office the following Monday to look into the account4.

How to Use This Meme

Trump meme formats typically pull from three wells: his own tweets, freeze frames from Apprentice-era footage, and clips from campaign rallies. Common conventions include screencapping his all-caps outbursts under confused replies, remixing his "Make America Great Again" slogan onto absurd images, and pairing his facial expressions with unrelated captions. The 2013 "Wow" chain also lived on as a template for recursive Twitter link jokes that dead-end at a Trump post1.

Cultural Impact

Trump's Twitter account went dark for eleven minutes on November 2, 2017 after a customer support employee deactivated @realDonaldTrump on their last day at the company, which Twitter confirmed in a two-tweet apology from its official government account that pulled a combined 68,000 retweets and 160,000 likes in under a day3. His El Chapo feud also spilled into corporate coverage: after Trump's Mexico line in his announcement speech, Univision, NBC, and Macy's each ended business ties with him, per ABC News reporting from July 20154. Trump treated the El Chapo escape as vindication of his immigration talking points and used it as reusable campaign material through the rest of 20152.

Fun Facts

The tweet at the end of the 2013 "Wow" chain was Trump complaining that "Shark Tank is a dead Friday night filler compared to the Apprentice"1

USA Today/Gallup polled Trump at only one percent of respondents for his 2011 most-admired ranking, the slim share that earned him the sixth slot8

El Chapo had escaped a Mexican high-security prison once before, in 2001, by hiding in a laundry basket after bribing officials5

Obama joked on The Tonight Show that his childhood feud with Trump in Kenya involved "constant run-ins on the soccer field" and that Trump "wasn't very good and resented it"7

Trump's FBI request over the El Chapo Twitter threat went to the bureau's Manhattan office the Monday after the tweet, per ABC News sources4

Frequently Asked Questions