The Funniest Memes and Tweets from Trump’s Axios Interview

By Garrett Martin  |  August 4, 2020 | 1:05pm
Screen cap from YouTube
Comedy Lists Donald Trump
The Funniest Memes and Tweets from Trump’s Axios Interview

You’ve probably already seen the news. President Trump sat down for an interview with Axios’s Jonathan Swan, and the result was one of the most thorough exposés yet of how dangerously uninformed and incompetent Trump is.

Here’s the full video, if you want to check it out first.

Swan’s successful attempt at basic journalism didn’t just reveal the soul-shattering ignorance of our country’s leader. It also jumpstarted the latest meme trend. Swan’s unconcealed disbelief at Trump’s staggering idiocy was immediately tossed into the meme mill and spread out across the internet; the interview also inspired countless jokes on Twitter that didn’t follow this new meme format.

Honestly, I’m not a big meme fan. I don’t make ’em. I get annoyed by a meme pretty much as soon as I realize it’s become a meme. There’s something inherently lazy and hackneyed about memes—they’re just prefab joke formats waiting for you to plug anything you want into them. It’s rare for individual examples to actually break out of a meme’s basic template, or say anything about the subject beyond simple recognition, or to even try to do either of those things. That’s true of Swan’s interview. Still, this meme hasn’t aged out of its brief period of fertility yet, meaning it’s still possible to do or say something with it that’s actually funny. And this is the rare meme that actually has some power behind it—not just because it can be legitimately funny, but because it is just so goddamned depressing in every possible way. This incoherent, blithering idiot and his incompetent response to the pandemic has lead to the deaths of over 150,000 Americans, with tens of thousands more almost certainly on the horizon. It’s impossible to watch this video, or laugh at these tweets and memes, without remembering the ongoing tragedy behind them, and how the government’s fundamentally unserious response to the pandemic has only exacerbated it.

Anyway. Jokes! Fun times! Laffs and yuks!

These tweets are good. They use the meme in ways we can appreciate, or simply comment on the interview with humor, intelligence, or both. Maybe you’ll agree. Either way follow all of these folks on Twitter.

 
Join the discussion...