According to former staffers, the Trump campaign team monitored the subreddit for messages that resonated, and Trump himself participated in an “Ask Me Anything” on r/The_Donald in July. But in the subreddit’s vocal and dedicated membership, you can find an influential strain of Trump boosterism. What can we say about the animating force behind r/The_Donald? For one, it’s not universal among Trump supporters nearly 63 million Americans voted for Trump, and the 382,000 members of r/The_Donald represent less than 1 percent of that. Members of r/The_Donald like to say they “ shitposted” Donald Trump into office regardless of whether the flood of memes swung the election, it did overwhelm the front page of Reddit to such an extent that the site’s CEO rushed to deploy a change in Reddit’s algorithm that limits the influence of any single subreddit. Some of those memes played on Clinton’s campaign gaffes, such as her use of the phrase “ basket of deplorables,” while others involved an emerging pro-Trump iconography centered around images of Pepe the Frog - a cartoon character with a convoluted history that gained especial prominence after it was co-opted by white nationalists as a sort of unofficial mascot. More broadly, they waged the “ Great Meme War”: an effort to get Trump elected by bombarding the internet with social-media-ready content promoting Trump or bashing Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. ![]() They mobilized to comb through the hacked Democratic National Committee emails published on WikiLeaks and played a large role in spreading information and theories about those emails. Its membership has grown steadily since the 2016 presidential election, though its members were especially active during the campaign. The subreddit, where posters refer to President Trump as the “ God Emperor” and “ daddy,” is arguably the epicenter of Trump fervor on the internet. But one group has shown nothing but unbridled enthusiasm for the president’s actions thus far: the over 380,000 members of r/The_Donald, one of the thousands of comment boards on Reddit, the fifth-most-popular website in the U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, in its turbulent first months, has drawn fire from both the left and the right, including the ACLU, government ethics accountability groups and former Bush administration officials. Links to Reddit may also contain offensive material. ![]() Editor’s note: The story below contains two slurs that appear in the names of subreddits.
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