Donald Trump Is Terminally Online

During last night’s debate, Donald Trump said some strange things, even by his own standards. He praised the Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán (using the antidemocratic term strongman approvingly); lamented that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are “eating the dogs”; and falsely suggested that Kamala Harris wants to do “transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” This is not merely the stuff of normal Trumpian discourse. This is the stuff of someone who is merely spending way too much time on the right-wing internet.

Trump has long used the internet prolifically. But recently, he has exhibited himself as someone who is not simply on the internet, but as someone who is of the internet. In real life, he speaks in posts emblematic of the terminally online. Orbán is a figure who is dear to much of the online far right for his moves to erode Hungarian democracy but who is likely not a well-known figure to most voters. “Transgender operations for illegal aliens in prison” is a phrase ChatGPT would spit out if you fed it right-wing posts and asked it to parody them. Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets in Ohio is a hallucination that was born on the right-wing internet as well.

If you spend enough time among the extremely online right, you’ll come to realize that they’re into deeply bizarre things. Not bizarre in the sense that their politics may be different from yours, but odd in that you might find their politics off-putting even if you otherwise agree with them on major issues. The extremely online right isn’t one thing, but a set of factionalized influencers and posters who often share bigoted memes and traffic in conspiracy theories. It includes the more well-known likes of Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and Charlie Kirk but also edgier figures who post under pseudonyms such as Zero HP Lovecraft and Bronze Age Pervert. The fringiest wings are into scientific racism, “white genocide,” and raw milk. They love talking about how they “will not eat the bugs,” (a conspiracy theory about a globalist plot to impel people to eat bugs to reduce their carbon footprint) and hate something called “the bugmen” (a term for what they see as frail modern, urban men).

These things don’t sound normal to people who do not binge-scroll through X feeds made up of posts by people with profile pictures of Greek statues with laser eyes and display names such as Raw Egg Nationalist. These posters say that the absurdity is ironic. It’s just a part of the joke. It’s just “schizoposting.” If you’re missing the joke, that’s your problem. By the time their ideas trickle down to people like Trump, most of the irony has been washed away, if it ever existed at all. Onstage, Trump didn’t sound like someone who was doing a bit or trying to troll anyone; he sounded like he believed every part of it.

Perhaps Trump himself is not incessantly scrolling the fringe of the right-wing internet, but he has surrounded himself with people who are. When Trump traveled to Philadelphia for the debate, he was joined on his plane by the online conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. Like other prominent figures on the extremely online right, she is prone to inflammatory posts. Loomer has said that she didn’t care about the 2019 shootings in New Zealand in which 51 people were killed in two mosques, and has maintained relationships with multiple white nationalists.

That Trump is extremely online doesn’t bode well for him. In 2016, Trump spoke more about the things that actually matter to people, even as his campaign rallies were rambling and at times incoherent. His populist rhetoric about corporate greed and elites touched prevailing currents that were coursing through the body politic. Even his bigotry made more strategic sense. Suggesting that brown Middle Easterners are possible terrorists, and instituting a Muslim ban, unfortunately had some mass appeal. Suggesting that Haitians are eating dogs in Springfield is incredibly niche. Post-debate polls suggest that voters saw the same thing—they handily selected Harris as the winner.

The change marks a shift in Trump’s rhetoric but also the right’s more broadly. Over the past several years, the right has been accruing political tombstones for candidates who logged on too hard: Blake Masters, Kari Lake, and Ron DeSantis all ran prominent internet-brained campaigns and lost their elections. DeSantis made abolishing “wokeness” his totalizing concern in his presidential bid, a thing that plays well on the internet but isn’t as galvanizing offline. Lake, who ran for Arizona governor in 2022, appeared with a Nazi sympathizer and QAnon supporters at campaign events. In her current, struggling bid for the Senate, she has pushed a version of the online white-nationalist “Great Replacement” theory. J. D. Vance, who is one of the most online mainstream politicians, won his Senate seat in Ohio, but his relatively narrow victory in a red state suggests that he won in spite of himself. Now, as Trump’s running mate, he appears to have brought this style of politics to the presidential campaign as well.

Trump said that he saw immigrants eating people’s pets on TV, but if this is actually how he came to the rumor, this, too, is a sign of the right’s descent into the fever dreams of its most online members. Right-wing cable news (and radio) channels used to play a significant role in setting the right’s agenda, but they now follow the lead of the oddest conspiracy theories being generated online. People like Tucker Carlson have long been a bridge between these two worlds, but parroting the discourse of the online right is now becoming the standard operating procedure of right-wing media at large. These lines have been further blurred by the ascent of explicitly right and more tacitly right-wing livestreams and podcasts, such as those hosted by Adin Ross and Logan Paul—both of which Trump has recently appeared on.

It may be that the entire American right is terminally online and that Trump is closing the gap. After nearly a decade of Trump shaping the online right, the online right has now done the same to him.