“The Penguins are feeling it”: A Multimodal Pragmatic Analysis of Delegitimisation in Anti-Trade War Memes

In the context of growing global tensions, Internet memes have become key sites of popular dissent. This paper examines a small corpus of anti-trade war memes from 2025, showing how they deploy multimodal strategies of delegitimisation to challenge political authority by disrupting Grice’s Cooperative principle and performing face-threatening acts (FTAs). These memes harness captioning, image macros, and intertextual references to produce humorous yet caustic political commentaries. The findings show how memes articulate a playful but subversive form of delegitimisation of political discourse, contributing to multimodal pragmatics and to our understanding of contemporary digital participation.