A Democratic National Committee trying to prove it can effectively fight back against Donald Trump’s administration has settled on a novel strategy to win back skeptical voters.
Since the start of President Trump’s second term, the normally buttoned-up social media accounts at the Democratic National Committee have leaned into shitposting.
The team has suggested the secretary of defense was tweeting while drunk, mocked Elon Musk’s reported drug use and embraced memes showing the vice president with a comically swollen face. In May, the group’s official X account even insinuated — without evidence — that a top White House official was a “cuck.”
It’s a wildly different approach for a committee traditionally associated with carefully scripted talking points, and for a party that has long preached, in the words of Michelle Obama, “When they go low, we go high.” Behind the attention-grabbing gambit, DNC officials say, is a strategy to rebuild the party’s battered brand by proving it is willing to get its hands dirty in a fight with Republicans.
“We’re in a moment now where people have expectations of us as the resistance party,” said Paulina Mangubat, the DNC’s digital content and creative director. “And so our social team has just been focused on the moment and embodying the attitudes that everyone is feeling right now.”
Mangubat helps lead a team of about a dozen core staffers who operate the DNC’s social media accounts. Each staffer is given wide discretion to post what they think will attract attention online.
DNC officials say the approach is to learn from the most successful social media accounts, including those that cover pop culture and sports, to craft a message that actually breaks through the noise.
“It’s putting people in charge who know how to dunk without reading a 40-page deck first,” said Tim Hogan, the DNC’s senior adviser for messaging, mobilization and strategy. “Go out and recruit those people, and empower those people that we already have on our team. I really think it is about putting the posters in charge.”
NOTUS asked Hogan if he would consider the new approach tantamount to “shitposting.”
“If you want to call it that, you could,” he said, although he added that shitposting was itself not the point of the effort.
The strategy comes as Democrats try to improve their image with the public, which has sunk to historic lows since Trump’s win last year. A CNN/SSRS survey from March found the party’s image at a 30-year low, driven in part by a sinking approval among even Democratic voters.
The DNC itself, meanwhile, has been beset by controversy since the announcement one of its vice chairs, David Hogg, would fund challenges to sitting Democratic lawmakers.
The new approach on social media is a small part of a larger effort to make the party more popular, especially with wayward liberal voters who think it should be doing more to oppose Trump, DNC officials say.
By some metrics, it’s working: The DNC’s social media accounts have grown by more than 1 million followers so far this year, according to the newsletter Chaotic Era. Some of the DNC’s videos on TikTok have received more than 10 million views. And the response on social media from allies has been largely positive.
Many of the DNC’s posts so far this year remain similar to what the committee would have posted in the past, such as attacks on the GOP’s reconciliation bill. But in between the familiar messages, the account now makes references to an “ugly ass truck” and questions over whether Trump is mentioned in the “Epstein files.”
The DNC went the furthest in late May, however, when it retweeted a Daily Beast story about Katie Miller, who is married to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, leaving the White House to work for Elon Musk. The committee posted the image of a solitary chair in a hotel room corner, which many online took as a reference to a sexual arrangement in which one man watches another have sex with their partner. DNC staffers refer to the post as the “cuck chair photo.”
.@StephenM: https://t.co/IjFdietRgU pic.twitter.com/ndcIsPHWFd
— Democrats (@TheDemocrats) May 30, 2025
There is no evidence that Musk and Katie Miller, who has been married to Stephen Miller since 2020, are engaged in a relationship. A White House spokesperson suggested the DNC was picking a fight it would not win.
“We’re the ones who invented aggressive messaging like this,” Steven Cheung, one of Trump’s fiercest surrogates, told NOTUS. “They have no idea what they’re getting into.”
DNC officials had a discussion about whether to use the photo, but it wasn’t a tough call to ultimately post it, Hogan said.
“It got proposed, and the immediate reaction was, ‘We have to do this,’” he said.
The post was viewed more than 2 million times on X, according to the site’s publicly posted metrics.
DNC officials said that the Trump administration’s actions justified the online mockery.
“I don’t think there’s anything that we could post on our social accounts that would match what the Trump admin is doing to people’s lives,” Mangubat said.
Democratic voters are eager to see the party fight back, she added, and treat members of the administration as “objects of ridicule.”
“It’s really important for us to have the confidence online to call out these members of the Trump administration as pathetic and embarrassing … that is an energy that people want to see from us because it projects confidence and a knowledge of how people interact on Twitter specifically,” Mangubat said. “It’s all about dunks. People are treating politics like sports games, they want to see their team clap back and fight back.”
The ultimate goal for the DNC’s social media accounts, Mangubat added, is to have the kind of reach that a nonpolitical site like Pop Crave shows.
More recently, the DNC has been making light of the public spat between Musk and Trump, including by highlighting the Tesla CEO’s claim that the president is mentioned in the Epstein files while also reiterating opposition to the GOP’s reconciliation bill.
“Kill the bill and release the Epstein files!” the DNC’s post said.
The type of posts the DNC now embraces show a greater degree of authenticity, Hogan said, that was missing previously.
“It is being willing to say what you believe,” he said. “It is not overthinking it. It is being quick. It is being blunt. It is being direct. I think those are the hallmarks of authenticity.”
Asked if the committee would ever shy away from a post because it went too far, Hogan demurred.
“I can’t recall saying no to anything that’s been proposed so far,” he said.
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Alex Roarty is a reporter at NOTUS. NOTUS reporter Jasmine Wright contributed to this story.
This story has been updated to correct the year Stephen and Katie Miller were married.