With American election fever now at a deafening pitch, there’s something dizzying about stepping from one filter bubble to another and seeing how differently the same event can be treated. Yesterday, for instance, Donald Trump staged a photoshoot in a branded garbage collection truck, in response to Joe Biden calling his supporters “garbage”. This in turn was in response to a stand-up comic at Trump’s recent New York City rally describing Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage”.

The Independent reported the garbage truck stunt as a “total fail”. The New York Times employed the “editorialising by proxy” strategy beloved of officially-still-objective newsrooms such as the BBC, in which they don’t so much report the stunt as report the reactions of people who didn’t like the stunt, so as to criticise it while preserving the appearance of merely reporting the news. Meanwhile, Trump-backing billionaire Elon Musk deemed it “genius-level trolling”, and the New York Post called it “a big, beautiful MAGA garbage truck”.

To say that I’ve been able to follow this story at all, despite having no direct stake in the US election, is an admission that I spend way too much time on the internet. But as such I have come to appreciate the power of a well-judged meme. And on this front Trump has consistently been head and shoulders above his opponents.

The visual of Trump in a hi-vis vest, behind the wheel of a Trump-branded garbage truck (bin lorry, in English), carries potent connotations. Momentarily, the former president became the working man, doing the smelly, arduous but socially indispensable work of collecting everyone’s rubbish. He became the practical man, doing tangible work in the real world. It is difficult to think of another politician capable of such a stunt — not even Trump’s own running mate J.D. Vance.

I’ve argued elsewhere that postmodern politics retrieves “representation” in a more medieval than liberal-democratic sense. And from this perspective, we can read Trump’s “garbage” stunt as representing — in archetype, if not yet in policy — a swathe of the American electorate that in recent decades has been largely abandoned by the Left which once voiced its interests.

Embodying archetypes in this way is a gift, not a learned achievement. Garbage Trump is only the latest in a string of memetically potent Trumpian images and utterances. When he visited a McDonald’s, made some fries and “served” from the drive-thru window, his enemies protested that it was all staged. But it made little difference, because the resulting images were simply too symbolically dense for such details to matter.

This in turn offers a clue as to why Trump consistently outclasses his opponents in meme warfare. He seems to understand at an instinctive level that dominating internet discourse isn’t about whether everyone thinks you’re a good person or not. The images, ideas, and phrases that make it beyond partisan filter bubbles do so not by being persuasively good across the board, but by transcending “good” and “bad” altogether.

There is no reconciling the filter bubbles now. But rather than viewing opposing filter bubbles as locked in a slide toward mutually assured destruction, to my eye the dialectic is more about mutual amplification and interdependence. Think of what happens every time one side or the other peels away to a social media ecosystem where they’re not confronted by their enemies, for example Mastodon or Bluesky. Without opponents, the conversation swiftly becomes boring, and defectors usually sidle back in the end.

In this context, true memetic power doesn’t rest in making everyone like you. Really, the entertainment value of the whole system rests on images and ideas strong enough to cross the containment barrier between filter bubbles, and drive discourse across the political spectrum. And in this game, nobody matches Trump. “Brat” and “joy” were good efforts, but ultimately weak. Meanwhile, it doesn’t matter if you’re lauding the Garbage Trump appearance as a supporter, or condemning it as a hater. Either way, you’re still sharing the image.

This raises many questions about how any of this maps onto the nitty-gritty of power. What role can serious policy debate possibly play in a battle for viral cut-through? What relation does meme power even have to real-world, institutional clout, and does the former ever influence the latter? Does going viral actually achieve anything?

I am not qualified to predict what will happen over the next few days. But whichever way the election goes, the result will be instructive on all these fronts.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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