Movie director Judd Apatow has floated a theory that there’s more to the unhinged memes that Donald Trump shares online than meets the eye.
The president has recently ramped up his meme output — much of it brain-rotting artificial intelligence slop ― with one of his most infamous recent shares: a video depicting him as a king pilot dumping crap all over protesters.
“My feeling is that it’s always more complicated than we know,” Apatow told Kara Swisher on Trump’s use of memes on the latest episode of her “On With Kara Swisher” podcast
“I don’t think this meme-ification is based on someone’s instinct,” said the “Knocked Up” and “Funny People” filmmaker. “I think there’s think tanks and psychological studies and everything that’s being done is being done because it’s been proven to work as propaganda.”
People can tend to dismiss Trump’s wild posts as him just “being crazy,” Apatow said. But he suggested it’s actually “totally planned.”
“I think there are literally psychiatrists figuring out, ‘How do you make people lose hope? How do you make people think that they can’t win a fight?’” he said.
Apatow said Trump and his MAGA allies’ strategy of “flooding the zone” with chaos makes it even more important for people to keep pushing back, “in spite of the fact that people want to humiliate you and make you feel hopeless.”
Watch from the 41-minute mark here: