Idolizing celebrities and making edits of famous people isn’t new. In the age of online influence mattering to the point of being utilized by official political campaign marketing strategies, it’s not surprising to see that this same trend of “memeing” and fan editing has trickled into our politics. As the absurdity of our political climate increases with each passing day, joking about politics can feel like the only way to survive it. Recently, however, I’ve found myself asking more questions. When does this entertainment-driven phenomenon become a trojan horse for our mass desensitization? Are we allowing funny online content to push us further into fascist regime and rhetoric?
The other night, a video appeared on my TikTok For You Page. It was a fandom-style edit of President Trump and Jeffrey Epstein with the song “Strangers” by Ethel Cain as the background music. If you’ve ever seen a romanticized edit of a TV couple or a heartbreaking montage of a fictional character, you know the format – slow zooms, soft transitions, dreamy music. Except this edit was not of a fictional couple. These are two real men — Epstein, a convicted sex trafficker with victims in the hundreds, and Trump, a longtime associate and friend of his whose name appears in the Epstein files 8 times, according to NPR. Men who represent not gossip or melodrama, but documented suffering experienced by real people.
I immediately found myself thinking about how distasteful the video on my screen was. These men are real abusers in hundreds of stories. These aren’t movie characters or internet sensations. What part of this horrific and very real scandal reserves its right to be woven into the entertainment we consume on a daily basis?
Annoyed at what I had seen, I went to scroll. To my shock, the edit was posted to the official Democrats TikTok account. I went to the comments to find some users reacting in shock, but most of them reacting with laughter and only slight disbelief. Many of them pointed out the song used, saying how ‘unserious’ or funny it was to see the two clashing themes in one video. Considering Ethel Cain is a transgender musician known for encompassing dark, haunting themes and criticism of American identity in her work, the contrast made the clip feel even more jarring.
It’s not surprising that political parties have picked up on what kinds of media modern Americans are more inclined to engage with. The share of adults who get their news from TikTok in particular has tripled since 2020 — a third of adults under 30 regularly get their news from the platform, according to the Pew Research Center. If TikTok has successfully asserted itself as a leading source for news, it would only make sense to shift promotion efforts to TikTok as well.
Gen-Z specifically engages with political media in a way that politicians have historically struggled to keep up with. In the 2024 election cycle, Kamala Harris’ “BRAT’ adjacent campaign, fueled by a simple supportive tweet by pop singer Charli XCX showed to be ineffective and silly at best. Kamala HQ went as far as changing their banner to the slime-green and simple low-resolution font associated with BRAT. Though it strengthened her already present base of supporters, it did nothing to show rural, less pop-cultured Americans why they should give her their vote. It served as a lesson to politicians that sometimes proving to be ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ does nothing for the actual credibility of your campaign.
Official party accounts feel pressure to stay active online even outside of election seasons, and staying active means following trends. Brands like Lionsgate hire fan-edit creators now for TV promotion, so it makes sense that political pages are trying to adopt the same strategies. But politics is not a brand and should not copy brand behavior without thinking about the consequences.
Something significant happens when we turn serious topics into entertainment: we stop feeling the weight of them. When real-life abuse and violence gets mixed into TikTok trends, they start to feel like just more content. Something to watch, laugh at, scroll past and forget. Victims become background images instead of people.
This kind of desensitization is harmful. When people stop reacting to serious problems, it becomes easier for powerful people to get away with things. History has shown that authoritarianism doesn’t always rise through loud, dramatic moments. Sometimes it grows quietly while the public is distracted or numb. If people see dangerous leaders over and over again in joke formats, they start to seem less threatening. The shock wears off.
That’s why seeing a political party make a fan edit of Trump and Epstein feels so wrong. It takes two people tied to real harm and wraps them in a trend meant to entertain. Whether the goal was to make Trump look bad or to call attention to his connection to Epstein doesn’t matter. The format itself strips away seriousness. It becomes a joke instead of a warning.
It also feels disrespectful to survivors. Epstein’s victims have had to fight for years to be heard. Their trauma has been pushed aside, doubted, turned into gossip and dragged through courtrooms. Turning that history into TikTok content, especially by a major political party, sends a message whether it meant to or not: that their pain can be packaged and posted for clicks.
Humor has a place in politics, but it cannot be the only tool we use. If everything becomes a joke, nothing feels important anymore. And when nothing feels important, we stop paying attention. We stop resisting things we should resist. That is the moment when harmful leaders gain power most easily. We can still laugh and cope as we need to, but we need to know where the line is. Not every subject is a trend. Not every issue should be turned into a TikTok edit. Some things deserve more care than that.
