The Drunk Trump meme takes footage of former U.S. president Donald Trump giving speeches or interviews and slows the audio and video to roughly half speed3. At that pitch, his already loose sentence structure sounds like a person slurring their way through a bar story. Some versions skip the slowdown entirely, and editors argue Trump's normal-speed delivery already carries a drunken cadence on its own.

The gag doesn't rely on impersonation or added effects. Editors typically pull existing broadcast clips, drop the playback rate in a video editor, and let Trump's own phrasing do the work. On Urban Dictionary, the phrase "drunk Trump" also picked up a second meaning tied to pool horseplay, showing how the name bled beyond the video format2.