President Donald Trump has made massive inroads with Gen Z voters through an alternative media strategy that took the president’s message directly to the digital town square.

As a deputy assistant to the president and White House deputy communications director, Kaelan Dorr is a key player in executing Trump’s digital media strategy. He joined a special episode of “The Signal Sitdown” to discuss how Trump became the “memer-in-chief.”

Over the course of the 2024 campaign, Trump eschewed traditional media, opting for a media strategy that met voters where they were consuming content. The Trump team brought the president’s message to podcasts and social media platforms instead of op-eds and prime-time cable news. The big secret, however, is that this strategy is actually “very simple,” Dorr said. “I think that’s what makes it very effective at the end of the day.”

“The beauty of the digital strategy and of the movement we’ve kind of curated over the last decade is that anybody can do it,” Dorr told me. “It’s truly valuable because it doesn’t require an ad executive on Madison Avenue … to talk about ‘what’s our message progression on this issue’ and ‘how do we do videos that tell a story over time?’” 

“I like to tell everybody this is the easiest job I’ve ever had because the American people gave us a honey-do list, and we’re just checking things off.”

Trump’s infamous use of social media serves as the foundation for the rest of the administration’s digital strategy.

“I was here in the last [Trump] administration, and every time I would talk to someone, they would grab me and go, ‘Can we get him to calm down with the tweets?’” Dorr recalled. “And now, people can’t get enough of it. I always find that to be absolutely hysterical. You missed the mean tweets. We all know you missed them.”

But Trump’s social media genius, Dorr suggested, is not just in the well-crafted jibe. It’s in his ability to demonstrate his understanding of the American people while communicating directly and authentically with them. For Dorr, “this all starts with a forgotten man and woman.”

“There is an entire through-line of the American public, people who are entrepreneurial, people who are pragmatic, people who aren’t buying what legacy institutions have been selling them for a very long time,” Dorr explained. “[Trump has] figured out before anyone else exactly how to communicate to those people.”

“He’s the memer-in-chief.”

“Finding ways to effectively communicate that very quickly, very unapologetic or irreverently, I think has been the ethos of the team,” Dorr said.

The irreverent tone aims to do more than just attack the president’s enemies. It is to facilitate conversations in America that the Left has attempted to silence.

“I like to think we’re arming people with the tools to go start conversations in their communities,” Dorr told me. “We’re sitting in a position to really not only drive the future of conservatism and populism and politics, but also get ahead of the curve in a way that I don’t think anyone’s been there before.”

“I think we’re going to do some really cool stuff,” he said. “We’re gonna break some brains and change the world for sure.”

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