From Satire to Self-Identification
Trump’s aggressive posturing towards Greenland provided an irresistible opportunity for political cartoonists to mock the MAGA movement using stock images of the Vikings, but these depictions did not arise out of the blue. As far back as 2010, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner were depicted by cartoonist R. J. Matson as Vikings running across President Obama’s desk while he was putting together a slideshow about policy compromises.
1 R. J. Matson/Cagle Cartoons 2010, “GOPs Storm the House,” reproduced by The Week, January 11, 2015, <https://theweek.com/cartoons/438196/gops-storm-house>, last accessed August 1, 2025. David Horsey, editorial cartoonist for the
Los Angeles Times, depicted the extremist elements of the Republican Party as fanatical and cross-eyed Viking raiders in a 2015 cartoon referring to Kevin McCarthy’s first attempt to become House Speaker.
2 David Horsey/Tribune Content Agency 2015, “Political Cartoon U.S. House Speaker Republicans,” reproduced by The Week, October 9, 2015, <https://theweek.com/cartoons/582387/political-cartoon-house-speaker-republicans>, last accessed August 1, 2025. He has also depicted Trump himself as a barbarian in a cartoon used to illustrate an article about the President’s rejection of the Paris Climate Accord.
3 <https://www.crispinhull.com.au/2017/06/09/diplomacy-and-science-v-trump-the-barbarian/>, last accessed August 1, 2025. Similarly, a cartoon for
The Economist depicts Brad Parscale as a Viking giving a thumbs up in front of a burning village in the illustration to an article about the digital strategy for Trump’s re-election campaign in 2020, which Parscale is widely credited with masterminding.
4 Kevin Kallaugher (KAL), Illustration to “The Trump Campaign,” The Economist, March 14, 2020, <https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/03/14/the-trump-campaign>, last accessed August 1, 2025. The use of the Viking image, based partly on what the article calls his “Viking beard,” is deployed in a slightly different way here, not to mock this ultimately unsuccessful campaign, but to criticize what the author of the article seems to view as a hysterical response to Parscale’s digital “dark arts”: mainstream media, according to this piece, prefers to paint Parscale as a modern-day Viking terrorizing traditional election cycles, rather than face up to the fact that it was the “moral choices of millions of voters” that got Trump elected in 2016.
5 Staff Writers, “The Trump Campaign,” The Economist, March 14, 2020, <https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/03/14/the-trump-campaign>, last accessed August 1, 2025.Recourse to the “Viking barbarian” image to characterize a movement challenging perceived elites and the norms of US politics was perhaps inevitable. But alongside these various deployments of the Vikings to satirize MAGA populism and responses to it, images of Trump as a Viking have also arisen from
within the movement itself. Some of these are probably connected to a fallacy originating in the radical-conservative and pro-Kremlin Russian newspaper
Zavtra that gained some traction during Trump’s first presidency: namely the idea that he may have been descended from a leader of the Rus’ via his mother. This pseudo-ethnology of the Trump dynasty was picked up by the tabloid press and used as a way to explain certain traits in the president, including his assertiveness,
6 This included the UK’s The Daily Mail. See Jessica Duncan, “Donald Trump Believed to be Direct Descendant of Rurik the Viking Who Established Russian State,” MailOnline, November 14, 2016, <https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3934470/Donald-Trump-believed-direct-descendant-Rurik-Viking-established-Russian-state.html>, last accessed August 1, 2025. and it was considered noteworthy enough to receive a response in an article for
The Conversation.
7 Keith Ruiter, “In Defence of the Vikings: They Wouldn’t Have Suffered Donald Trump,” The Conversation, March 30, 2017, <https://theconversation.com/in-defence-of-the-vikings-they-wouldnt-have-suffered-donald-trump-71185>, last accessed August 1, 2025. Reporting on this confected story led to some of the first positive depictions of Trump as a Viking, often using crude photoshops of his face superimposed onto a stereotypical image of a “Viking” warrior.
8 See, for example, <https://www.insidehook.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/trump-viking-illustration-1117-1.jpg?w=934>, last accessed August 1, 2025. Contrary to the narrative of political satirists that relied heavily on negative connotations, Trump’s acolytes seem to emphasize what they see as the positive associations of the Vikings with masculinity, dominance, and a willingness to take the torch to the political establishment. This has led to a fairly consistent stream of representations of Trump as a Viking, including merchandise cashing in on this fairly niche trend: on a popular online marketplace you can buy an AI-generated canvas print of Trump as a leather-clad Viking,
9 <https://www.amazon.com/Historical-Leadership-Pictures-Presidential-Conqueror/dp/B0DSLS7DL9?th=1>, last accessed August 1, 2025. and from specialist retailers, T-shirts featuring a glowering Trump with horned helmet and the slogan “make Valhalla great again.”
10 <https://thenorsewind.com/products/viking-trump-t-shirt-make-valhalla-great-again?srsltid=AfmBOoq_RT3lBlsYdqhSuRKMO-1wmEWcN1lWoFaUbEVgzmZtAO-p6t5r>, last accessed August 1, 2025. The Trump History account on X, which posts AI images of a youthful-looking president succeeding in various historical roles, included an image of him as a Viking surveying a beach in what is probably supposed to be a newly discovered Iceland.
11 This image is discussed by Daniel Zuidijk, “MAGA’s Latest Fad Taps AI to Create Trumped-Up History,” in a Bloomberg Newsletter, August 30, 2023, <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-08-30/maga-s-latest-fad-taps-ai-to-create-trumped-up-history>, last accessed August 1, 2025. He is topless – unsurprisingly, as the account seems to delight in eroticizing its subject – and wearing what AI has interpreted as Viking historical dress, including, of course, horns (which seem to emerge directly from his head), bracers, and loincloth.
~
Figure 4. Screengrab from the Trump History account on X.
Against this backdrop of the merging of contemporary and historical strongman aesthetics in online MAGA spaces, which has seemingly flown under the radar of editorial cartoonists and political satirists, it is perhaps not so surprising to find that in the middle of the Greenland debacle, high-profile leaders of the MAGA movement were themselves reaching for the image of the Viking, and to very different effect. On January 7, 2025, prior to the Vances’ tour of Pituffik Space Base, Donald Trump Jr. made a day-trip to Greenland’s capital, Nuuk. Insisting that he was there for tourism did not cut much ice considering he arrived aboard Trump Force One in the middle of the controversy about his father’s comments about the autonomous territory. Don Jr. later posted some “candids” from his trip to social media, and these closed with an image of himself in faux-Viking costume with horned helmet.
12 <https://www.instagram.com/p/DEh81L4O0D1/?hl=en&img_index=9>, last accessed August 1, 2025.The image looks to be AI-generated, and it would not be worth wasting time on deconstructing such a dumb simulacrum of the medieval, except that the
intent appears to be very similar to that implied by
The Spectator and
New Republic cartoons and their use of stock Viking tropes as a shorthand for conquest. Handing out MAGA hats in Greenland’s capital (another image in the same group of candid photos) was an extremely provocative act on the back of Donald Trump’s remarks, repeated at a press conference later that same day, that he intended to acquire Greenland.
13 Miranda Bryant, “Donald Trump Jr Visits Greenland amid Father’s Interest in Owning Island,” The Guardian, January 7, 2025, <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/07/donald-trump-jr-greenland-visit>, last accessed August 1, 2025. The photo of Don Jr. as a Viking, while easy to dismiss as a harmless bit of cosplay, is similarly provocative. It raises the specter of violent conquest and uses Greenland’s medieval history to make a thinly veiled threat in the present. Like the decision to hold a photoshoot in front of the controversial statue of missionary priest Hans Egede – target of anti-colonial activism in the wake of the George Floyd protests in 2020 – the Viking dress-up was, at the very least, part of a carefully curated set of images intended to advance his father’s political message.