This White House has followed in Joe Biden’s footsteps by mistaking its loudest hagiographers on the internet for a valuable and representative constituency.

The Germans have a word that lacks a direct English translation but describes the sense of vicarious embarrassment one experiences on behalf of someone who is humiliating themselves: fremdscham. It is not an uncommon sentiment save for the realm of partisan politics, in which any expression of shame is regarded as defeatism. Those of us who cannot subordinate basic human emotions to our political objectives suffered an intense bout of fremdscham on Thursday, care of the Trump White House.

It wasn’t just the flippancy with which Trump administration officials and Republicans in Congress handled the showy reveal of the Justice Department’s supposedly unseen documents relating to Jeffrey Epstein’s vile underage sex-trafficking ring. It wasn’t that House Republicans mocked those who concern themselves with the physical safety of children, nor was it the spectacle in which MAGA influencers displayed binders adorned with fake declassification markers filled with information that had been public for a decade.

All of that matters, of course. The extent to which the GOP caters to an infinitesimally narrow band of online commentators who take nothing seriously and are scornful of those who do threatens to tank the whole enterprise. But what should really unnerve this president’s supporters is that this White House has followed in Joe Biden’s footsteps by mistaking its loudest hagiographers on the internet for a valuable and representative constituency.

The Biden White House surrounded the president with friendly content creators, few of whom have any claim to an enduring cultural legacy. Their value was in their ability to manufacture the false sense that their ephemeral online popularity was transferable to the president and reflective of a broader pro-Biden sentiment abroad. It was all illusory, and the Biden White House did plenty of damage to its brand by retreating into social media’s hall of mirrors.

The most memorable humiliation to which Biden’s staff subjected their boss was an occasion in which a transgender activist exposed a pair of fake breasts for the cameras on the South Lawn of the White House. Fewer remember the event in which the activist engaged in that disgrace: An inordinately off-key party celebrating the passage of a deficit spending bill Democrats had the gall to call the “Inflation Reduction Act.” It was a display of indifference to our shared reality that even the press couldn’t ignore. “Biden celebrates ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ as food, rent prices climb,” read one illustrative Reuters headline from the era. The event was a cascading, multi-layered embarrassment.

But that was only one of the mortifications the Biden White House forced Democrats to endure amid their pursuit of online cachet. Recall from the depths of distant memory names like Victor Shi, a 21-year-old student whose unctuous fawning over Biden’s sheer majesty would have made the 17th All-Union Communist Party Congress blush. He became a fixture at White House events. So, too, were the many no-names recognizable only to social-media addicts but whose faces are familiar only because their antics revealed just how culturally out of touch the administration had become.

The president and his followers succumbed to the lunatic notion that they could appropriate internet subcultures, even those that were hostile to Biden, and popularize them — a herculean task at which they failed. Indeed, Biden’s staff should have expected failure. Imagine trying to explain to a well-adjusted adult the origins of the “Dark Brandon” meme: You see, some Talladega fans once made fun of Biden using a four-letter word, which a reporter misheard as “Let’s Go Brandon,” which became an epithet used to criticize Biden online, which the White House repurposed as a meme in which the president has laser eyes. . . . You will get a lot of blank stares.

Despite all this, the Biden team never wavered in its conviction that the influencers held the keys to broader political relevance. “The idea of giving influencers their own White House briefing room was even floated,” Axios reported last month. It is inauspicious to see the Trump White House embrace one of Team Biden’s worst ideas.

But embrace it they have. MAGA meme maker “DC Draino,” “Libs of TikTok” proprietor Chaya Raichik, OANN personality Liz Wheeler, comedian Chad Prather, Q-Anon promoter Mike Cernovich, professional conspiracist Jack Posobiec, and others in that orbit were featured prominently. They allowed themselves to be used as props for a photo-op that revealed only how little regard Trump’s staff has for their most committed supporters. Some of them even expressed displeasure over how they were abused, though they directed their ire at the “deep state” — what with its omnipotent capacity to make its critics out to be fools. The MAGA influencer set’s anger is righteous but misdirected.

In his second term, Trump has a unique opportunity that was not there in his first term: the chance to reclaim the culture from the attenuated left-wing institutions that once occupied America’s cultural commanding heights. Trump will probably blow that chance if the White House follows Biden’s path to irrelevance by surrounding the president with an entourage of neurotics and sycophants.