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 primetime 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.

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