The Trump orb is a 2017 internet meme, based on a photograph of American president Donald Trump and other heads of state touching a glowing orb.[7]
Photograph setting
The meme was begun when a photograph of President Trump, Saudi Arabia King Salman, and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi touching a glowing orb was released (via tweet) on May 21, 2017 by the Saudi Arabian embassy in the United States. The touching of the orb – a decorative illuminated world globe[8] – was part of the ceremonial opening of the Global Centre for Combating Extremist Ideology (called "Etidal")[9] in Riyadh, an institution designed to counter militant ideology and messaging[1] with over 200 analysts[10] monitoring extremist propaganda and communications internationally on traditional and on-line platforms.[11] This took place during President Trump's spring 2017 visit to Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, his first international journey. The placing of hands on the globe symbolized the national leaders' combined commitment to ending terrorism, and signaled the activation of a four-minute[9] welcome video on nearby viewscreens, officially opening the centre.[12][13] President Trump had, in an earlier speech, described the institution as a "groundbreaking new center [that] represents a clear declaration that Muslim-majority countries must take the lead in combating radicalization".[5]
Other photographs of the event were published, and according to the New York Times, the futuristic setting (one reporter described it as "a hybrid of a game-show set and a television thriller’s idea of a counterterrorism operations control room") with walls of viewscreens and banks of computers in a darkened room may have contributed to the ambience of the photos which led viewers to concoct and share imaginary scenarios to accompany the photos, thus setting off a classic internet meme propagation process.[8]
Birth and propagation of the meme
The photograph, which was described as odd,[14] creepy,[15] weird,[16] eerie,[17][18] or bizarre[19] by commentators, was quickly disseminated through social media[13][2] (sometimes with the hashtag #trumporb); the volume of posts was such that it was described by the Indian Express as a "frenzy";[20] Reuters characterized as having "set alight the internet",[21] and Time opined that "An image of President Trump touching a glowing orb at a summit in Saudi Arabia has lit up the internet with its reflective glow".[22]
The phenomenon was soon noticed and described at length by other mainstream news venues internationally.[11][23][8][24][9][25][4][26][27] The Irish Times reported "Donald Trump’s whistle stop tour of the Middle East has generated many headlines, but nothing has caught people’s imagination more than a bizarre image of the US president with his hands on a glowing orb."[19] These reports noted that observers had noted a similarity to scenes (as a cinematic trope) in The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and other films[12] such as The Wizard of Oz.[3]Space Jam.[18] Harry Potter,[8] and the orb Loc-Nar in Heavy Metal[6] and the Bajoran Orb Of Time from Star Trek,[28] and comparisons to the fictional organization Hydra[10][24] and other comic book and movie organizations[8][9] such as the Legion of Doom[4] were also made.
Various captions were attached to the photograph and disseminated, such as William Kristol's "Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble" (a line from Macbeth),[13] and Matthew Yglesias' sarcastic "Elites scoff, but in the working class suburbs of Grand Rapids voters are glad Trump is practicing orb magic with Arab dictators."[3] A tweet by political scientist Brian Klass juxtaposed the photo with a screenshot of movie wizard Saruman holding a palantir and the dry comment "What a time to be alive", while Breitbart News's tweet added a photo of Star Wars creator George Lucas with his quote "I may have gone too far in a few places".[8] The Church of Satan published the photograph with the caption "For clarification, this is not a Satanic ritual".[23][25] Conservative Never Trumper pundit Jonah Goldberg quipped "They said if I voted for Evan McMullin we'd get a mysterious cabal of Orb worshippers – and they were right."[6]
Internet rumor analyst Snopes investigated the phenomenon and reported that while the photograph is real, the orb is "not magical, was not being used to control the eye of Sauron, and was not the centerpiece of an Illuminati ritual".[29] Within days, internet meme database Know Your Meme had documented the phenomena,[30] and Mashable noted, "Someone already made a Wikipedia page for 'Trump orb'".[31]
On May 26, 2017, Katherine Timpf launched a new segment of Fox News Specialists, "Kat on the Street", with interviews of bystanders to find out their reactions to the now-famous orb photo.[32]
Spread into political and other media
Within a day the meme had spread widely enough to be used as an example in political articles. Vox's Zack Beauchamp in a foreign policy piece said "It’s hard to think of a more potent metaphor" for what he described as President Trump's reversal on foreign policy, contrasting the president's earlier promises to deal harshly with Islam and combat globalism with the photo of the president "literally holding a globe surrounded by Muslims".[33] Liberal Mother Jones pundit Kevin Drum in a financial analysis decrying "obscure budget gimmicks" said "It's magic! Maybe it's the power of the orb at work. (You all know what this refers to, don't you?)"[34] Slate leveraged the meme, pretending to consult the orb for its regular feature the Impeach-O-Meter.[35]
Within days, television comic commentators took notice of the meme. Jimmy Kimmel called it "without question the strangest thing I have ever seen a president do", while Stephen Colbert quipped that the subjects of the photograph "need to work on your not looking like supervillain skills. It looks like they’re activating the undersea robot to emerge from its volcano base to kill Aquaman".[36] Shaun Casey, the director of the United States Department of State's Office of Religion and Global Affairs, averred in an editorial that there was "limited utility in... symbolic acts of orb-handling".[37]
A week later, five European Prime Ministers reenacted the photo using a soccer ball. The ministers, Lars Løkke Rasmussen of Denmark, Erna Solberg of Norway, Juha Sipilä of Finland, Stefan Löfven of Sweden and Bjarni Benediktsson of Iceland, posed for the parody photo in Norway, where they were meeting to discuss cooperation among their nations.[38][39]
Conservative magazine The American Spectator decried the meme, saying "the children who call themselves journalists got distracted by a literal shining orb. The advantage of talking about the orb is that the media doesn’t have to report the positive substance that happened in Saudi Arabia."[40]
Summarizing President Trump's first trip abroad, which had included the 2017 Brussels summit as well as the 2017 Riyadh summit, USA Today placed "The Orb" at the top of its list of memorable moments,[41] as did Vox.[42] The Los Angeles Times said that the trip "hasn’t produced any diplomatic breakthroughs so far, but has generated some memorable images. There was Trump with his hands on a glowing orb in Saudi Arabia...",[43] and The Telegraph called it "one of the many memorable moments from the foreign tour".[44] The Boston Globe's lengthy analysis of the trip included a photograph of the orb scene and noted that though the image "generated discussion at home" it did not affect the outcomes of Trump's trip.[45]
See also
References
Category:2017 in Saudi ArabiaCategory:Cultural depictions of Donald TrumpCategory:Donald Trump and social mediaCategory:Internet memes introduced in 2017Category:Political Internet memes