Here’s a fun game:
Here are four lines from four famous speeches.
- “Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears…”
- “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty…”
- “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets…”
- “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low…”
Most people will be able to identify them easily enough. Shakespeares’s Mark Antony addresses the crowd in “Julius Caesar”, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Churchill’s famous June 4th, 1940 address to Parliament, Martin Luther King outside the Lincoln Memorial in 1963.
But how many of us familiar with the speeches could recite them, word for word? Very few.
But we don’t need to. We’ve already internalized them, condensed their meaning and bundled them up into nice, bite-size pieces we can share. Memes, as it were.
In 1976, Richard Dawkins defined memes as “units of cultural transmission” – ideas that spread like a virus from brain to brain. In 2025, they’re how power moves.
Trump knows this. So does Elon. As he put it: “Who controls the memes controls the universe.”
The evidence keeps stacking up: Trump launched a cryptocurrency, and within 24 hours, it hit $27 billion in market value, while Musk now heads a government department named after a dog meme coin (DOGE).
The numbers don’t lie: In 2017, Trump’s media coverage ($817 million) exceeded the combined coverage of the world’s top 1,000 personalities ($721 million). As Peggy Noonan noted, he achieved “complete cultural saturation.”
Here’s the paradox: love ‘em or hate ‘em, you’re spreading their memes. Every outraged headline, every supportive tweet, every eye roll or fist pump – they all feed the machine.
This isn’t about politics. It’s about how ideas spread in 2025. One meme can launch billions in value. Another reshape the government.
The point is that the ideas that stand out win – regardless of what you think about them. If you have a strong idea, it comes with a responsibility: to make it unforgettable and spreadable.
It is language that changes culture: The design of culture is the design of influence.
