The jobs-versus-mobs line also provides insight into the social media feedback loop between President Donald Trump and his supporters. | POLITICO Illustration/Getty Images White House How an internet meme became a Trump campaign slogan The creator of 'Dilbert,' a Reddit user and Newt Gingrich all helped to make a random tweet part of Trump's midterm stump speech.

It used to take a fancy degree and political connections to become a presidential speechwriter. In the era of President Donald Trump, all you need is a tweet.

On a Thursday morning earlier this month, a Twitter user in Georgia with 500 followers responded to a video of Trump touting the economy and denouncing Democrats by tweeting the hashtag “#JobsNotMobs.” The next day, Scott Adams, the pro-Trump creator of the comic strip “Dilbert,” who has nearly 300,000 followers, endorsed this catchy framing in a tweet of his own. The hashtag took off from there, as Trump supporters on Reddit turned it into a visual internet meme, with images of autoworkers set against leftist antifa protesters. Even former House Speaker and Trump confidant Newt Gingrich tweeted in praise of the concept, calling it “a nice, clean formula.”


Within a week, Trump had begun incorporating a variation of the concept — “Democrats produce mobs, Republicans produce jobs” — into his stump speech, and his campaign began printing up signs to distribute at rallies with the slogan “Jobs vs. Mobs.”

The line’s journey from a stray thought on social media to the heart of Trump’s closing midterms argument offers a case study in the free-wheeling approach to messaging that has enabled the brander-in-chief to thrive in a fast-moving information environment even while relying less than his recent predecessors did on consultants, focus groups and other tools of modern political messaging.

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Instead, Trump relies on a kind of crowdsourcing — drawing messaging ideas from his fans online and anywhere else effective rhetoric can be found.

“The president and his communications team scan everything and share possible good lines with each other," explained Gingrich. “One of President Trump’s strengths is his willingness to learn from virtually everyone.”

The jobs-versus-mobs line also provides insight into the social media feedback loop between Trump and his supporters, one that amplifies vitriolic conspiracy theories and fringe views as often as it provides catchy slogans.

The seeds of the new slogan were planted in early October, with the bitter confirmation fight over Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. As liberal activists swarmed Capitol Hill, in some cases surrounding senators in hallways to demand they vote against Kavanaugh’s nomination, Trump and his fellow Republicans began condemning Democrats as the party of “mob rule.” At rallies, Trump spoke of a “radical Democrat mob” and warned, “You don’t hand matches to an arsonist, and you don’t give power to an angry left-wing mob.”

That talking point fell flat for one of Trump’s influential Twitter superfans, a Republican consultant and self-described philosopher named Ali Alexander.

“I want to go on the record saying that ‘mob’ probably won’t play as well as some proponents think,” Alexander tweeted on Oct. 12. “It doesn’t place proper blame, sounds like hyperbole and there is no urgency. ‘Left-wing violence’ with links and imagery will play better. More accurate too. Political terrorism.”

That tweet was spotted by Adams, who, to the dismay of some fans of his cartoons spoofing office-cubicle life, has become a prominent Trump supporter online. The “Dilbert” creator offered a suggestion: “‘Mobs’ by itself doesn’t work,” he tweeted. “But ‘Jobs Not Mobs’ is brain glue plus framing and contrast. Science says the brain interprets rhymes as persuasive.”

In three short words, the line encapsulated the argument that was crystallizing among Republicans for keeping them in power, presenting the kind of vivid contrast offered by Vice President Joe Biden’s catchy 2012 rationale for reelecting Barack Obama — ''Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive'' — but even more succinctly.

Adams is part of a loosely knit network of social media-savvy Trump supporters who specialize in making memes and hashtags trend, thereby pushing them into the mainstream conversation. His quarter-million-plus Twitter followers include the likes of Donald Trump Jr. and Trump reelection campaign senior adviser Katrina Pierson.

In an email, Adams — a student of hypnotism who admires Trump’s mastery of the psychology of branding — said he hadn’t come up with “Jobs Not Mobs” himself but had seen it in a comment on Twitter, though he couldn’t remember where. “This is the sort of meme that likely popped up in multiple places and travelled multiple paths,” he wrote in an email. “Expect more than one claim of original authorship. That would be normal and probably true.”

The original source of Adams’ inspiration was likely Danny East, a user in Georgia with about 500 followers. According to The First Tweet, a third-party tool for finding the first mention of a phrase on the Twitter, East was the first to mention “Jobs not Mobs” on the platform, when he tweeted it early on the morning of Oct. 11 as a hashtag in response to a video of Trump speaking.

East told POLITICO the line came to him in the shower, though he could not say for sure whether he invented it or had seen it somewhere else before. “I personally think having a job brings a lot of positive things into a person’s life, and a lot of things that tend to stir people up seem a lot less important,” he explained. When East saw the video of Trump waxing on similar themes, it struck him as an opportunity to turn the line from his head into a Twitter hashtag.

Adams endorsed the framing the next day. After Adams’ tweet was retweeted hundreds of times, the hashtag began taking off.

The day of Adams’s tweet, a Reddit user quickly picked up on it and added a new dimension. On the pro-Trump Reddit channel R/The_Donald, Nevada-based user BryanVision posted a thread titled “Jobs not Mobs” along with an image contrasting auto workers with antifa protesters. The user — who told POLITICO he goes by the name Bryan Machiavelli and charges $200 an hour for “memetic warfare consulting” — also posted alternative visuals and a bare template on the website imgur, to encourage other users to refine the meme and disseminate it around the internet.

Soon after he created the meme template, he said, people began printing it on T-shirts, which he saw for sale online.

Back on Twitter, the line proliferated, gaining influential new fans. “Merle miller of Iowa City said to me last night this election comes down to jobs versus mobs,” Gingrich tweeted four days later. “I thought that was such a nice, clean formula I wanted to share it widely."

Two days after that, at a Thursday evening rally in Missoula, Mont., Trump declared, “Democrats produce mobs. Republicans produce jobs.” Along with Trump’s praise of Montana congressman Greg Gianforte for assaulting a reporter, it ranked among the biggest applause lines of the night. That night, Trump also tweeted, “#JobsnotMobs.”

It is not clear exactly how the line got into Trump’s speech. Representatives of the campaign and the White House did not respond to several requests for comment. Alexander said White House staffers texted him to offer congratulations when Trump used the line, but he declined to name the staffers.

According to a person familiar with Trump’s messaging, the line was part of the president’s planned Missoula remarks from the beginning of the drafting process.

“I’m not sure from where it came, but speechwriting certainly had it as part of their content fairly early on,” said the person. “It’s not like [Trump] was on a plane and the idea came to his head.”

In general, ideas for capitalizing on social media trends tend to get to Trump through White House social media director Dan Scavino, the president’s longest-serving aide. “He’ll say, ‘This is really taking off, I think you should engage,’” said a White House official, who added that aides like political director Bill Stepien and counselor to the president Johnny DeStefano will regularly suggest social media trends to Scavino to incorporate in messaging. “Even people who interface with the president a lot will still run thoughts through Dan," the official said.

Spectators pray before a speech by President Donald Trump at a campaign rally Oct. 20 in Elko, Nev. | Alex Goodlett/AP Photo

The official said that one of Trump’s most memorable soundbites during the Kavanaugh fight — his lament that the judge was being treated as “guilty until proven innocent,” in a reversal of due process — had been picked up from online chatter. The line “had played well online, had been brought to him, [and] he said, 'Yeah, let’s put that in a speech,’” the official said. “And then it became sort of a rallying cry."

Messaging ideas can come to Trump from all corners of his sprawling world. When former White House strategist Steve Bannon worked in the West Wing, he tasked an aide with monitoring social media output from grassroots supporters like Adams and Mike Cernovich, as well as radio personalities like Mark Levin and Michael Savage, regularly asking how certain issues were playing with those figures, according to a person familiar with the arrangement.

White House communications aides regularly monitor the Twitter feeds of other conservative personalities — including Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, Terrence K. Williams and Laura Ingraham, according to a former White House staffer.

After the warm reception for the "jobs-mobs" line in Missoula, Trump’s team doubled down on the framing. The following afternoon, Trump tweeted the hashtag again, along with a video of him speaking straight to camera from the Rose Garden condemning Democrats as unruly.

That evening, at a rally in Mesa, Ariz., the campaign distributed signs with the slogan, “Jobs v. Mobs.”

Trump supporters just outside the rally even heckled a small group of protesters with shouts of “Jobs, not mobs!”

After the rally, Trump tweeted the hashtag once more. “This is what it is all about for the Republican Party!” he wrote.

The tweet included a photo of a man leaving the rally wearing a T-shirt with a "Jobs not Mobs" logo — the same design Machiavelli had published on Reddit a week before.

Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.