Doge has broken free from the dark corners of internet culture and – soon – will make its home in the White House
The Doge memes are out in force now Elon Musk has landed himself a job in Donald Trump’s incoming government.
It comes after he three nearly £100million behind the convicted criminal’s successful campaign to win the US presidential election on November 5.
Trump has appointed the world’s richest man – worth an estimated £161billion – as head of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
In a statement, the president-elect said Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy ‘will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies’.
We’ll leave it to your imagination to figure out what this white liquid is supposed to be
Many of the memes made in response have highlighted Musk’s cost-cutting credentials.
He claimed to have axed 80% of X’s workforce within the first year after buying the social media platform – then known as Twitter. Half of employees were sacked in a single month.
X, former Twitter, users familiar with the platform’s frequent bugs and bots might disagree
If you can’t tell, this meme uses ‘fat shaming’ to imply the US government’s budget is bloated
President-elect Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk have at least one thing in common – they’re fond of saying ‘you’re fired’
But it’s the department’s acronym, and its striking resemblance to a popular meme Musk is fond of, that’s driving the flood of memes.
‘Doge’, an intentional misspelling of the word ‘dog’, is a meme based on a Shiba Inu dog that’s been around since 2010.
It’s become a meme of many meanings, often captioned with broken English, often with a hint of sarcasm.
The meme was firmly embedded in internet culture even before it became the namesake of a cryptocurrency called Dogecoin, sometimes dubbed a ‘meme coin’.
‘It’s the circle of life’! Or is it the circle of doge?
DOGE isn’t actually a government agency and will instead provide ‘advice and guidance’ to the White House from outside of government
Dogecoin stocks surged over 10% after Trump named Musk as co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency
Musk is such a fan of the meme, he briefly changed Twitter’s blue bird to doge, months before rebranding the social media platform as X.
After doing so, the Dogecoin’s price was driven up by more than 36,000%.
This resulted in a $258 billion lawsuit being launched against him for allegedly manipulating the coin’s price.
Musk has periodically posted images of the dog for years, with his lawyers describing his public statements about the coin as ‘innocuous and often silly tweets’.
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