President-elect Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that one of his top donors, Elon Musk, will co-lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. It’s a not-even-thinly-veiled nod to the popular Doge meme, depicting a cute Shiba Inu, which is also the inspiration behind the meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin.
The commission, which will advise Trump, isn’t an actual government department — those have to be affirmed by Congress. But Musk seems to have successfully turned a joke he made on X in August into an actual advisory role in the Trump administration.
Musk has been a known proponent of the Doge meme for years.
The meme itself is simple. It references a Shiba Inu, a breed of hunting dog from Japan. The dog, who’s named Kabosu, captured the internet’s hearts by being exceptionally cute, similar to other, older animal-themed memes like Grumpy Cat. Its owner, a kindergarten teacher in Japan, first posted a picture of Kabosu in 2010, but the Doge meme went viral in 2013 when people added multicolored Comic Sans-styled text to the photos, imagining a dog’s internal monologue in broken English. A picture of this Shiba Inu in a pile of autumn leaves might read something like: much leaf, very pile, many fall, such pumpkin spice latte.
The jokes were funny 10 years ago, but like any meme, these unfamiliar phrasings could only remain entertaining for so long. However, Doge maintained cultural relevance because, in late 2013, two software engineers created a new cryptocurrency as a joke and named it Dogecoin, a reference to the Doge meme.
For a cryptocurrency that was created to make fun of cryptocurrency itself, Dogecoin has taken on a life of its own, and in part, we have Musk to thank for that. He’s been a longstanding proponent of the purposeless coin, even announcing a Dogecoin-funded “DOGE-1 Mission to the Moon” via SpaceX. (It was initially planned to launch in 2022, but DOGE-1 has not yet gone “to the moon.”)
Musk also confirmed that Tesla owns some unknown amount of Dogecoin when he was sued for $258 billion for an alleged racketeering scheme designed to inflate the price of the cryptocurrency. (The lawsuit was dismissed earlier this year.) Musk toyed with Dogecoin at X, too, having briefly changed the company’s logo last year to be the doge meme — another move that resulted in a sharp boost in the price of Dogecoin.
Similarly, Dogecoin spiked by nearly 20% on Tuesday night after Trump announced the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Musk’s meme-based antics aren’t new; see the 420 joke that was a part of the “funding secured” Tesla debacle, for instance. But for Trump, it’s a bit less expected.
Doge follows the same trajectory as Pepe the Frog
The Republican Party has a history of embracing memes to their advantage. During Trump’s last presidential term, a popular meme dubbed Pepe the Frog became associated with the alt-right.
Created by comic artist Matt Furie in his 2005 comic “Boy’s Club,” Pepe the Frog is a cartoon character and embodiment of the “dudes rock” ethos — a shorthand for immature, yet not actively harmful activities among groups of young men (such as the “Boy’s Club” characters). For Pepe, that means he’s a carefree dude who just wants to smoke weed and play video games with his bros. Pepe probably does not know what a 401(k) is, and it’s doubtful that he owns a bed frame.
Most people who used the Pepe meme never knew about its origins; instead, they just saw a frog with various expressions that they could use to portray their emotions, from deep sadness to sheer delight. People felt a kinship with the meme, often adopting him as their avatar on various forums like 4chan’s /b/ board, which generates some of the most heinous content on the internet due to its lax rules and decades-long reputation for breeding chaos.
Pepe’s ubiquity on the web continued for over a decade. In 2015, the frog was the most reblogged meme on Tumblr. So when Trump announced his campaign for president that year, Pepe was still prevalent online. Because the meme is so divorced from the original context of the Matt Furie comic, the apolitical character became a de facto dog whistle signaling involvement in alt-right movements. Trump began to post Pepe memes that echoed his beliefs, as calls to “build the wall” on the country’s southern border with Mexico grew in the U.S.
For communities on the internet that had grown accustomed to portraying Pepe in Nazi gear or as a U.S. border patrol officer, Trump’s acknowledgment of their memes felt like an endorsement.
This escalated further when Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., shared a graphic mocking Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s pronouncement that Trump voters are “deplorables,” which included a version of Pepe as Trump. As a result, the embrace of the term “deplorables” grew and Pepe became synonymous with alt-right movements. In a TV interview where the white nationalist Richard Spencer gets punched in the face, he’s wearing a Pepe pin on his blazer.
Memes like Pepe function well as a political dog whistle because they seem innocent and already have proven their popularity. Yet what looks like images of sad frogs or happy dogs can be twisted into something darker. Though not all uses of the meme were intended to signal alt-right associations, the Anti-Defamation League ended up classifying Pepe as a hate symbol.
Pepe has since come around. Strangely enough, the frog is more associated with crypto and Twitch streamers than alt-right activism these days; the frog was even represented on signs in pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Doge could now fall into the same trap that Pepe landed in, 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 stretched into something new, over and over again. The unofficial, Musk-led DOGE office may not be the final fate of Kabosu the Shiba Inu.
