Is DHS’s Pokemon-themed ICE meme good political PR?
If you have been (blissfully) off the internet the last 24 hours, you may have missed the Department of Homeland Security’s Pokemon-themed Immigration and Customs Enforcement social media hype video.
You can watch it here, but if you don’t have a whole minute of your life to devote to this, just imagine the Pokemon “Gotta Catch ’Em All” theme song over a montage of federal law-enforcement agents cuffing suspects, which we can assume are illegal aliens.
A friend asked me this morning: “Do you think this is an example of the administration being ‘too online’? Or is this effective messaging to Gen Z?”
“Too online,” I responded.
“But do you think it will turn off Boomers?” my friend followed up. “I don’t think they will even see it, and I don’t think legacy media will know how to cover it to generate outrage. So that mostly leaves the intended audience to see it.”
Maybe — but I’d still fall into the “too online” camp. Let me explain.
This genre of tweets (there have been a variety of others since the Trump administration took office) is “way too online” because it’s almost entirely irrelevant. Government social media accounts being run by 20-something edge lords posting kitschy memes are not going to reverse the trend that (a) Donald Trump almost won Gen Z in November 2024, (b) enjoyed a positive approval rating with under-30s at the beginning of the year (about 55 percent positive), but that (c) Trump’s Gen Z support has fallen by roughly half (to ~30 percent approval) over the course of this year.
In August, the Pew Research Center found that only “69% of Trump voters under 35 now approve of his job performance, down 23 points from the start of this term.” Yes, that means that almost a third of young Trump voters no longer approve of Trump’s performance. In July, a CBS News/YouGov poll found that Trump has lost 27 points off his under-30s approval rating since the beginning of his term, down to an overall 28 percent.
Why? Well, I don’t think it has much to do with the Trump administration’s meme game one way or the other. It’s the economy, stupid.
Young people think that, under Trump, inflation has gotten worse, the job market is tightening, and housing is unaffordable. Memes aren’t going to change any of that. Therefore, the administration PR strategy here is, yes, way too online.
But, my friend counters, “I’ve seen a lot of commentary online that speculates that the reason Trump’s approval rating has fallen with Gen Z has more to do with the fact that he’s not going hard-right enough, and this would be a way to address that, if true.”
But of course hard-core Zoomer partisans want the administration to go hard to the right. They’re hard-core partisans, after all. But the numbers show that they’re a distinct minority of young voters. Trump was popular (for the moment he was) among Gen Z as a whole because young Americans thought that Trump might fix Joe Biden’s economy. That’s the whole ballgame. That’s what Trump is being and will be judged on.
If anything, way-too-online memes, such as this Pokemon/ICE example, probably hurt the Trump administration politically more than it helps — on the margins — by alienating middle-of-the-road independent types of all ages who don’t love mass deportations to begin with. (These squishy people support border enforcement in principle but they don’t exactly want to see enforcement or hear about it; they definitely don’t like seeing funny memes about it.)
But I don’t think it makes a big difference either way. Again — way too online.
Donald Trump’s political super power is that, for most of a decade, he convinced a majority of Americans that he was good for the economy. But if the public continues to be dissatisfied with inflation, high prices, high interest rates, and sluggish growth, then “the economy” will turn into Trump’s kryptonite. Pokemon memes will be an afterthought of an afterthought.