The most furious and oddly compelling of the Trumps is developing a personal brand as a victim of the platform he loves.
Donald Trump Jr.’s highest-performing Instagram post of the year (so far) is a piece of misinformation. Shared in March, it’s a black square with “THIS IS A TEST” written in red across the top. “Instagram has been limiting our posts so that no more than 7% of our friends see our posts,” it reads. “If you see this post, please simply comment with ‘Yes’ and then like it.” This exact text—with its specific choice of 7 percent and its ambiguous use of the word our—has been circulating on Instagram since at least the beginning of 2019, when it was debunked as random nonsense. Trump Jr. gave the meme a caption: “Get to work folks,” he wrote.
With more than half a million likes, the post received about nine times the engagement of one of Trump Jr.’s typical posts, according to data from CrowdTangle—a fact suggesting, in itself, that the meme’s premise was unfounded. “I wasn’t sure if the info in the image was correct and based on the amount of engagement this post got, it looks like it isn’t,” Trump Jr. clarified in an update to the caption. “Still, like many conservatives, I’ve seen a huge unexplained drop in engagement over the past few months on here.” This probably did not surprise his 4.6 million followers, as he talks about these sorts of “unexplained” phenomena basically all the time.
“Big Tech Censorship is getting worse,” Trump Jr. likes to tell his fans. The platforms that he loves are run by “tyrants” who pick on him because they hate his father, and are fanatical about fact-checking him even when he’s obviously just joking. While Donald Trump Sr. frets over how unfairly he was treated as a politician—worse than any other U.S. president, including Abraham Lincoln—Trump Jr. worries about how unfairly he is treated as a content creator and brand. In the past year or so, he’s made himself the internet’s foremost Aggrieved Influencer. (His highly aggrieved dad, as a reminder, has been kicked off most mainstream platforms.)
Whether Trump Jr. is laying the groundwork for his own political—possibly presidential—aspirations is unclear, but he’s more than your standard internet attention seeker. He interprets his father’s style of populism by framing likes, comments, and followers as another set of privileges that have been wrested away from regular people and hoarded by liberals and elites. Whatever his end goal, he is succeeding at one thing at the moment: He’s fostering a growing, adoring, monetizable fan base by carrying the torch for what you could call “social-media justice,” a ridiculous but apparently sincere priority for the rising stars of his party.
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