If the joke makes no sense, thats the point. This style of scary tweet was popularized earlier this summer by a handful of enormous pop-music fandoms that used it as a pointless trolling tactic. That its now bled over into the presidents mentions is indicative of just how ubiquitous stan culture has become. Memes that were once niche now inform how huge numbers of people react to or experience major news events.

Read: The joke's on us

Though a few of these phrases have drifted around odd corners of the internet for some time, it was stan culture that brought them out of obscurity and turned them into meme campaigns. The most common Punjabi phrase people are using to hex the president seems to have originated in a tweet unrelated to Trump, from a fan account dedicated to Cory Monteith, the Glee star who died in 2013. The phrase was picked up for hexing by fans of the K-pop group BTS and the rapper Nicki Minaj, as well as a random assortment of internet oddballs. And Amharic phrases similar to the ones being tweeted at the president were used by hundreds of Taylor Swift fans earlier this summer, who tweeted them at music critics they believed had given the singers new album unsatisfactory reviews. In that case, the text was usually paired with images of Swift Photoshopped to look like a demon, but since Friday, they have been paired with all kinds of haunting scenes: a Lego character with human skin, a giant tarantula with the arms of a man, Teletubbies with black holes for eyes, the Long Furby. But it remains unclear how Swift fans originally stumbled across this tactic for Twitter taunting, or why exactly they chose Amharic for it. They obviously think it looks spooky, though others have criticized them for this cultural insensitivity.

The hexes are similar tobut far more aggressive thananother common fandom tactic: replying to everything with homemade fan cam clips of ones favorite star. Both are methods of sowing chaos and derailing the logic of a conversation, and often they dont even involve any explicit organization. Networks of fan accounts have been so coordinated for so long that they can make something a trend without tryingeven a fake curse in an arbitrarily chosen foreign language.

Not so long ago, the antics of stans were generally focused on issues related to pop music and celebrity, and typically siloed by fandomAriana Grande and Nicki Minaj and Justin Bieber fans keeping to their own, unless they were warring with one another. But now the experience of being online is a stan-culture experience for nearly everyonea big, somewhat generic, and somewhat hallucinatory one. Earlier this summer, K-pop fans used fan cams to taunt QAnon supporters and people who were tweeting things like White Lives Matter, to much applause from the broader internet. Now people from all sorts of fandoms are tweeting joke hexes at the president, because its simply another thing theyve decided to do. People with no obvious relation to any one of these fandoms are copying them. Unfortunately, it might soon be another de facto way to respond to a tweet from someone you dont particularly like.

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The Creepy Trump Meme Taking Over Twitter - The Atlantic