I Went Viral For Having A Trump Tattoo On My Forehead

The truth seems to matter very little when it’s coming from Donald Trump. The same can be said about this prank.

For as ephemeral as the internet age feels — we tend to move on from one thing to the next at lightning speed — our mistakes have more staying power than ever before. Our errors don’t disappear, they just lay dormant until they inevitably return with a vengeance. I know this from personal experience as a silly little joke I made in 2016 (which feels at least 10 lifetimes ago) continues to haunt me. 

I was working at Inked Magazine and made a little bet with my editor on April Fools Day. We’d each write a prank article and whoever got the most clicks would win. Good harmless fun, right? He wrote a piece about how Disney was preparing to unveil a policy that would ban visible tattoos at their theme parks [Which I told everyone about and fully believed until the day  I read this post, Charlie. I hope I'm not the only one. -Jane], I decided to pose as a man named Kyle Campbell who chose to get  “Trump” tattooed on his forehead.

I made the trek to Trump Tower and thought I'd get either high-fives or my ass kicked. Nothing happened. I forgot it was New York and nobody cares what weird stuff you have tattooed on your forehead.

You have to understand, it was a different time. The clown car Republican primaries were still rolling with Trump favored, but Ted Cruz and John Kasich were still hanging on. And even with Trump on the cusp of winning the nomination, the general vibe was still that his candidacy was a textbook case of hubris taking over the brain of a man too rich and vain to imagine a world where he wasn’t the most important person. This was before the Muslim ban, before the kids in cages, before the insurrection, and before he was found criminally liable for sexual abuse. I was convinced his candidacy would be a punchline abandoned to the dustbin of history by Thanksgiving. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves… 

On April 1st we posted both articles. The Disney article blew up. The Trump tattoo caught some chuckles but relatively few clicks. By about 3 p.m. I admitted defeat and thought the entire prank would blow over without any lasting effect other than a learning experience with exfoliation as I tried to scrub the Sharpie off my forehead. Then in September 2016, my now-wife received a text from her dad asking if the meme he found on Occupy Democrats was me. 

This is the first and one of the kinder versions of the meme. It has been sent to me by my high school English teacher, my father-in-law, friends, coworkers, and multiple relatives I've never met.

A few minutes later the dam burst and I started getting messages from people I hadn’t heard from in years. People I went to high school with, my dad’s bridge buddies, relatives I had never even met in person, friends of friends of friends of friends — it was everywhere. And the comments were… not great. I was called a loser. An incel. A piece of shit. A worthless asshole who will never touch a woman. A couple dozen comments told me to kill myself. There was a bizarre faction who pounced upon the “Firefly” shirt I was wearing and told me that Joss Whedon would personally hate me (which is very funny in retrospect).

It put me in a really weird position. I’d be lying if I claimed I hadn’t invited all of this ridicule. Hell, the ridicule is the exact reason I did it! But the world had changed immensely in the months that had passed. Trump was now the nominee and he was spitting venomous hatred every time he opened his mouth on the campaign trail. And here I was being held up as the embodiment of the problem. Everyone who saw the “tattoo” and castigated Kyle Campbell was on my side politically, yet it was hard to see the attacks as anything but personal. 

After Trump became president it was no longer possible to ignore how dangerous the MAGA cult of personality had become (and still is), and the character I created was the perfect avatar. My face had become the poster image for everything wrong with our political system. It was just so easy to post my picture as an example of how brainwashed and stupid the right had become. 

The image became so prevalent that Snopes had to write an article debunking it, which is the best thing to come out of this. It’s hilarious that it was someone’s job to fact-check something dumb I put up on the internet, but the joke certainly doesn’t land the same way any longer.

I came to expect the image to pop up every couple of months. I’d have a giggle with whoever sent it to me — while I’d avoid reading the comments lest I further injure my already fragile self-esteem — and go about my day. Then in May 2021 things took a really dark turn when Lexi Alexander, the director of “Green Street Hooligans,” tweeted this:

This was the moment when it stopped being funny and started to really piss me off. Her refusal to take the post down or admit her error enrages me to this day.

A Twitter account with a not-insignificant number of followers was using my picture and saying that I was Jacob Fauci, an American-born man who had been accused of stealing a Palestinian family’s home. My Trump tattoo image had gone from being a vague condemnation of the MAGA movement to a specific man allegedly committing a horrible crime. When I was quickly identified in the thread as someone other than Fauci, Alexander dug in and said that we look the same.

The post wasn’t taken down. It was retweeted many times. And the things people said in the replies were troubling to read. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t me they were talking about, not when I saw my own eyes staring back at me. Seeing things change from general mockery to a very specific condemnation — and one that I agreed with at that — thoroughly drove home that once we posted that article I was no longer in control of the narrative. And no matter what I did in the future, it would never truly go away. 

As I write this we’re nearing the end of another contentious election season involving Trump, and while I haven’t seen it pop up in the last few months, it’s only a matter of time. I’m terrified about the prospect of another Trump presidency and the damage it will do. But as a cis-white-straight man, I also recognize my privilege, both today and eight years ago. I was in a place where I could make a joke about the idiotic reality TV star/fake rich guy spewing hatred because there was no personal danger for me. I wasn’t the one being called vermin or rapists or groomers in front of roaring mobs. I was just trying to chase some clicks by pretending to get the world’s dumbest tattoo. And it’s that miscalculation of the stakes that makes me ashamed I ever made the joke in the first place. 

I was naive about what this country is capable of. I thought we’d evolved to a point where it was impossible to elect such a brazenly horrible human being to the highest office in the land. At the time, I thought we’d all have a good belly laugh and move on, not that this man would ultimately be responsible for the fall of Roe and that he’d attempt a fucking coup. At one time I wanted that image to be plastered on every corner of the internet, I wanted it to be inescapable. I wanted to go viral. And I did. Fuck me.

Now I get sick when I see it. I haven’t found it funny for a long time, if it ever really was in the first place. I just want it to go away. But unlike the Sharpie we scrawled onto my forehead, no amount of scrubbing will remove the feeling of shame I get in the pit of my stomach each time the image pops up. So please, get out there and put in the work to make sure this goddamn meme will never be relevant again.