President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that one of his major donorsElon Musk will co-lead the new Ministry of Government Effectivenessor DOGE. It’s a not-even-thinly-veiled nod to the popular Doge memedepicting a cute Shiba Inu, which is also the inspiration behind the cryptocurrency meme Dogecoin.

The commission, which will advise Trump, is not a real government department – ​​these must be confirmed by Congress. But Musk seems to have succeeded in his turn a joke he made about X in August in a true advisory role to the Trump administration.

Musk has been a known supporter of the Doge meme for years.

The meme itself is simple. It refers to a Shiba Inu, a breed of hunting dog native to Japan. The dog, whose name is Kabosu, has won the hearts of netizens by being exceptionally cute, similar to other older animal-themed memes like Grumpy cat. Its owner, a kindergarten teacher in Japan, first posted a photo of Kabosu in 2010, but the Doge meme went viral in 2013 when people added multicolored Comic Sans-style text to the photos, imagining the monologue internal of a dog in broken English. A photo of this Shiba Inu in a pile of autumn leaves might look like this: lots of leaves, lots of piles, lots of falling, like pumpkin spice latte.

The jokes were funny 10 years ago, but like any meme, these unfamiliar lines could only remain entertaining for so long. However, Doge has retained its cultural relevance because in late 2013, two software engineers created a new cryptocurrency as a joke and named it Dogecoina reference to the Doge meme.

For a cryptocurrency created for make fun of cryptocurrency itself, Dogecoin has taken on a life of its own, and we partly owe Musk for that. He has been a long-time supporter of the coin without aim, even announcing a Dogecoin-funded project”DOGE-1 mission to the Moon» via SpaceX. (It was originally planned to launch in 2022, but DOGE-1 is not gone yet)to the moon. “)

Musk also confirmed that Tesla owns an unknown amount of Dogecoin when he was prosecuted for $258 billion for an alleged racketeering scheme to inflate the price of cryptocurrency. (The trial was rejected earlier this year.) Musk also played with Dogecoin at X, after briefly changed the company logo last year to be the doge meme – another move that led to a sharp increase in the price of Dogecoin.

Likewise, Dogecoin increased by almost 20% Tuesday evening after Trump announced the creation of the Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE).

Musk’s meme-based antics are nothing new; see joke 420 which was part of the Tesla “secured financing” debacleFor example. But for Trump, it’s a little less expected.

Doge follows the same trajectory as Pepe the Frog

The Republican Party has a history of adopting memes to its advantage. During Trump’s final presidential term, a popular meme dubbed Pepe the frog became associated with the alt-right.

Created by comic book artist Matt Furie in his 2005 comic strip “Boy’s Club”Pepe the Frog is a cartoon character and the embodiment of “rock guys» ethos — shorthand for immature, but not actively harmful, activities among groups of young men (like the characters in “Boy’s Club”). For Pepe, that means he’s a carefree guy who just wants to smoke weed and play video games with his brothers. Pepe probably doesn’t know what a 401(k) is, and it’s unlikely he owns a bed frame.

Most people who have used the Pepe meme never knew its origins; instead, they simply saw a frog with various expressions that they could use to describe their emotions, from deep sadness to pure pleasure. People felt a kinship with the meme, often adopting it as their avatar on various forums like that of 4chan. /b/ tablewhich generates some of the most abhorrent content on the Internet due to its lax rules and decades-long reputation for generating chaos.

Pepe’s omnipresence on the web continued for over a decade. In 2015, the frog was the most reblogged meme on Tumblr. So when Trump announced his presidential campaign that year, Pepe was still present online. Because the meme is so far removed from the original context of Matt Furie’s comic, the apolitical character has become a de facto dog whistle signaling his involvement in far-right movements. Trump began posting Pepe memes that echoed his beliefs, as calls to “build the wall” on the country’s southern border with Mexico grew in the United States.

For communities on the Internet that had grown accustomed to depicting Pepe in Nazi garb or as a U.S. Border Patrol officer, Trump’s acknowledgment of their memes felt like an endorsement.

The situation became even worse when Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., shared a graphic mockery of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s statement that Trump voters are “deplorable,” which included a version of Pepe as Trump. As a result, adoption of the term “deplorables” increased and Pepe became synonymous with far-right movements. In a television interview where the white nationalist Richard Spencer gets punched in the facehe wears a Pepe pin on his blazer.

Memes like Pepe work well as a political dog whistle because they seem innocent and have already proven their popularity. Yet what looks like images of sad frogs or happy dogs can be transformed into something darker. Although not all uses of the meme were intended to signal far-right associations, the Anti-Defamation League eventually ranking Pepe as a symbol of hatred.

Pepe has since returned. Oddly enough, the frog today is more associated with crypto and Twitch streamers than with alt-right activism; the frog was even represented on panels pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Doge could now fall into the same trap that Pepe fell into, becoming a symbol of the second Trump administration and Elon Musk’s involvement in it. But as Pepe showed, a meme has the potential to be reappropriated and transformed into something new, again and again. The unofficial DOGE office led by Musk may not be the final fate of Kabosu the Shiba Inu.