We don’t have to keep falling for Trump orders designed to divide us | Opinion
As President Donald Trump spitfires fundamental challenges to whatever good is left in our country, I often take solace in an enduring meme — meaning, the viral images and gags circulating social media that define the language of the internet — that, for me, eases the blow of our daily dystopia.
Let me explain the Fell For It Again Award.
The meme is defined by a shoddily drawn picture of a shoddily formed man — bald, bespectacled and neck-bearded — grimacing as he poses with a blue ribbon that reads “Fell For It Again.” The beauty of memes is that they never stop evolving. One versatile iteration slaps a cap on the award-winner’s head from whatever sports team lost a big game, a stand-in for the follies of fandom. (Sorry in advance to Buffalo Bills fans reading.) Fandom for half of the voting public is visually defined by a red hat, so the most prominent Fell For It Again meme guys has dozens of ribbons from head to toe, covering most of his body and even crowding his face, but leaving his bright red “Make America Great Again” hat in clear view.
Who is the Fell For It Again guy? It’s a portrait of a man who keeps playing dumb games and winning stupid prizes. He’s the one railing against the price of groceries while voting for the guy whose 25% tariffs on imported goods from Mexico and Canada will show up at the checkout line. He blasts President Joe Biden for FEMA’s $770 checks in disaster relief — the maximum legally mandated payment — while Trump discusses dismantling the entire agency He’s the immigrant who wanted Trump to get rid of the illegals only to find ICE can’t tell the difference. He hates Obamacare but has two young adult kids who still have insurance through the Affordable Care Act.
Your local Fell For It Again guy was feeling it. On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order that paused federal funding on a range of federal grants, loans and financial assistance programs. Nearly $60 billion of direct payments go to Texas, with tens of billions more in federal grants for roads, schools, agriculture, health and more — line items most of you probably weren’t trying to defund when you went to the voting booth. (Trump told us he never even read all those spooky Project 2025 plans, right?) Meals for Wheels, a nonpartisan nonprofit group that gets more than a third of its funding from federal grants, was “very worried” its wheels would fall off.
As Trump bombards us with executive orders and directives chipping away at the republic, Fell For It Again Award Guy is, admittedly, the funniest image running through my mind. But it wasn’t the first.
Not before the families of transgender people wondering if they’ll be able to access life-saving medicine for their children, mothers who relied on WIC to pay for formula to feed their babies, and immigrant families watching ICE raid their neighborhoods. Meanwhile, I can’t, with any sense of intellectual rigor, conveniently separate the most sympathetic figures affected by Trump’s onslaught with my beloved Microsoft Paint caricatures. All our polls show that our demographics are purpling, with meaningful shifts among Black, Latino, Asian and working-class voters. The joke on my screen and the neighbors on my block are increasingly the same person.
So, while I can enjoy the joke — let me laugh before the next executive order bans it — the punchline will end and we still gotta live our lives. And I would like for less people to fall for it.
I believe the key to not falling for it is to understand, deep in your gut, the idea that our fates are linked.
Few people endeavor to live selfishly, so I believe that most of you, no matter who you voted for, know, or can come to know that we are connected. Unless you’re X Æ A-Xii Musk (or his dad), too wealthy to conceive why some families might need WIC and Meals on Wheels, you’re capable of understanding how the “stupid [expletive]” the government does — the stuff that Trump is undermining through his orders — benefit most Americans.
An administration openly telegraphing its disdain for groups that you don’t see yourself in on the campaign trail — transgender people, refugees and, ahem, “DEI hires” — won’t stop there. First they came for the transgender inmates getting health care, and I said nothing because I wasn’t trans or locked up. Are you writing the American Niemöller poem?
I am not picking on Republicans. There were not nearly enough Democratic voters telling their party that its conduct was unacceptable. Ceding ground on transgender rights and liberties is ultimately an assault on bodily autonomy. (Y’all got bodies, don’t you?)
In our backyard, Collin Allred, who likes to remind us he was a former civil rights attorney before becoming the latest Texas Democrat auditioning for the role of Ted Cruz’s inevitable foil, spent the tail of his campaign abandoning trans people in sports — including children. He walked back his reasonable legislative record, and in return, got dog-walked by his opponent. In one of his final actions as a congressman, Allred voted for a bill stripping military families of gender-affirming healthcare, which Biden then signed.
Did you know Allred raised over $100 million yet lost by eight points? There are more than enough blue ribbons to go around.
Refusing to robustly and vigorously stand up for minority constituencies — here and abroad — and assuming the party will have indefinite support of those minorities is the liberal version of the “Fell For It Again” award.
For all the bluster around Trump’s vicious rhetoric, Biden infamously deported more people than Trump did in his first term. While Trump encourages Israel to “clean out” Gaza” like it’s a dirty closet instead of a region inhabited by millions of Palestinians, one must remember he’s only in the position to say this because Biden allowed and funded Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of the region after the Hamas attacks. Kamala Harris offered no public plan on pivoting from Biden, despite the very real possibility of being subject to prosecution for war crimes and a supermajority of disapproval that influenced the outcome of the election in at least one swing state.
For now, I’m still laughing at the memes. When the Medicaid website shuts down, laughter is truly the best medicine. But, without a critical mass demanding meaningful change from the people who represent us in office, it won’t be long before the joke is on me.
By Wednesday afternoon, after widespread outcry, the White House rescinded its federal funding freeze, effectively rolling back its rollbacks. Around the same time, Trump announced he would sign a new order that would allow him to deport noncitizen college students who joined pro-Palestinian protests. Conveniently, Trump also claimed he successfully intercepted $50 million in wasteful spending — all for condoms that would have been delivered straight to Hamas. He says he’s fighting antisemitism.
You buying it? If so ... here’s your prize!
This story was originally published January 29, 2025 at 2:38 PM with the headline "We don’t have to keep falling for Trump orders designed to divide us | Opinion."
