Do you like using based as an adjective? Do you call your enemies cucks? And most importantly, have you made the pledge to elect Donald J. Trump to the presidency of the United States?
If you answered yes to all three, I would recommend to you the classiest, highest energy corner of the Internet, Reddit’s r/The_Donald.
In the past few months The_Donald has skyrocketed in activity to become the second most active subreddit on the site. Despite having only about 96,000 subscribers, the subreddit has many posts reaching the front page of the all section and scorching the earth of Reddit’s political landscape.
Up until recently, Reddit was insufferably pro-Sanders. A nonstop mouthpiece of Sanders propaganda from r/politics (about 3 million subs) and r/sandersforpresident (about 220,000 subs). While this still continues, The_Donald’s posts have been acting as a counterbalance on a site long thought as anathema to conservatives. Subscribers of The_Donald have quick trigger fingers on the upvote button and are able to frequently get their posts visible by the rest of the site’s users.
Unlike most political subreddits, The_Donald is far more jokier in tone and allows its users to post truly absurd memes, gifs and fan art.
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
And this is exactly how it was always intended to be.
The sites current head moderator, /u/jcm267, said the subreddit began as a way to celebrate the humor of Trump’s candidacy, before he was a serious choice for president.
“At the time I was laughing at Donald Trump, although I wasn’t a hater,” Jcm267 said. “I thought his campaign was the most hilarious thing I’ve ever seen.”
The amusement eventually turned into heartfelt support, but the core hilarity of the Trump campaign is still present in the subreddit. Even if you aren’t a Trump supporter, the site will still give you a few chuckles due to its over the top style that so well emulates the actual candidate.
“We try to be Reddit’s version of the Trump campaign,” Jcm267 said.
And like the real Trump campaign, the subreddit has its own problems from Bernie supporters. Users from SandersForPresident often “brigade” or downvote en masse posts on The_Donald and post anti Trump comments in discussions. Despite their best efforts many of these posts still reach the front page.
Here is an announcement by one of the mods lamenting this problem.
The_Donald has a strange way of embracing everything ridiculous and crazy about Trump as a candidate, ratcheting it up to an eleven and turning it into legitimate support of his campaign. It memifies everything about the Trump from the low energy/high energy continuum to the his oft mentioned wall. And underneath all the jokes lies a bedrock of ardent Trump supporters, an online army that is slowly taking over Reddit.