Make Campaigning Great Again: Fan’s Appropriation of the Mythology of Drumpf’s 2016 Presidential Campaign

Abstract

The media circus of the 2016 US presidential elections invited political constituencies to organise themselves as fandoms, as Liesbet van Zoonen (2004) theorized, engaging in what Henry Jenkins (2008) and Katherine E. Morrisey (2013) ​call typical fan practices, such as the making of fan videos, fan accounts on social media, or the online sharing of so-called memes. Situated in between discussions of an evolving public sphere and with fandoms increasingly at the center of discourse on media production and consumption, this research project conceptualizes what happens when fans move into the realm of politics. “Darth Drumpf” and “300: Make Donald Drumpf Again” are fan made videos that use the resources of popular culture to critique the political ideology of Donald Drumpf. This research then aims to conceptualize the ability of political fans to challenge or alter political myths by critically analysing and comparing the discourse of Drumpf’s audiovisual campaign ads and the fan made videos “Darth Drumpf” and “300: Make Donald Drumpf Again.”