In a historic and embarrassing first, an old Reddit meme may become an actual government agency in Donald Trump‘s second term as president, thanks to Elon Musk. Months before Trump’s reelection, the Tesla CEO and Trump megadonor was riffing on X (formerly Twitter) about a possible administration role in something he called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. On Tuesday, the president-elect announced he was making that dream a reality, appointing Musk, along with businessman and failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, to lead an agency of that very name, which would “pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy.”
With that action, Trump turned a more than decade-old meme into a bizarre and powerfully consequential reality for U.S. politics.
By internet standards, “doge” is an ancient artifact. In 2013, photos of Kabosu, a female Shiba Inu owned by a Japanese…
