The 'Wacky Packs' Revolution Prevailed

Americans now choose political leaders not based on substance but on fantastic and ridiculous memes

Mar 10, 2025

When Donald Trump was coming of age in Brooklyn and Queens and learning how to discriminate against minorities most effectively to please his never-satisfied father, I was a kid in New Jersey collecting Wacky Packages, or as we called them at school, “Wacky Packs.” I loved Wacky Packs. I could giggle for hours looking at the small cards that were sold wrapped and packaged like baseball cards.

The highlight was the sticker that came with each package. Many notebooks for school had a sticker stuck to the inside cover to provide us with hours of humorous distraction at school. The nuns were not fans of the Wacky Packs, but so long as they weren’t in full view of everyone, they would let this one case of innocent, non-Catholic rebellion slide. Since I have been working on a small book — it will be around 20 pages or so — about how the bro revolution took over America, I have become more aware of how aspects of bro culture have dominated our political reality for decades.

Since Trump came onto the scene, memes showing him in superhero poses, conquering evil and saving America, have been everywhere. Trump, not in the least bit embarrassed by the ignorant and ridiculous memes, regularly shares them almost in the way many of us share photos of ourselves from younger, leaner, and meaner days. Some people, and I don’t understand this, put up pictures of themselves in their Facebook avatars from 40 years ago. In some cases, when you see these people now, it hits home how poorly they have aged.

Trump has never shied away from showing himself in those heroic, epic poses. He relishes in the attention and loves how the riffraff views him. Due to his narcissism, he probably shuffles around the White House and Mar-a-Lago, reveling in the invincibility of those superhero memes. As we have learned over the years from watching Trump, he is not smart.

He is a dumbass. All the talk about him being successful is just wishful thinking and Trump’s own bluster. He would be wealthier today if he had done nothing with the money his father left him. Instead, he squandered most of it on his failed real estate deals. His success, however, has been to create a Wacky-Pack approach to life that turns everything upside down with a contagious irreverence that hooks dumber and less morally sound people.

I remember us as eight-year-olds at recess trying to develop our versions of Wacky-Packs. We would draw packages for popular brands and alter them to make them funny. One that had us all in stitches in 3rd grade was “Dr. Peepee” instead of “Dr. Pepper.” The popular corn chips called Fritos were “Fartos.” We even had the linguistic guile to come up with “Honey’s Buns” for “Honey Bun.”

This Wacky-Pack approach to morality and America’s core beliefs has served Donald Trump well. While others spent their youth studying economics, logistics, mathematics, English, construction, architecture, and cultures, Donald Trump was lurking in the shadows, perfecting his skills of observation. He learned how best to find our weakest and darkest moments and then turn them into vicious but amusing attacks against society’s neediest.

When the young woman was raped and beaten in Central Park, without a shred of evidence that the young men arrested for the attack were guilty, Trump overwhelmed the New-York-New Jersey area with an ad campaign to suggest these five young men be put to death for their “heinous crimes.” He played on our puerile need for immediate retribution and our fear of the unknown in a way that shredded the Constitutional rights of those young men. Even though those five boys were eventually found innocent of the crime, most Trumpists, including Trump himself, still see them as guilty.

Expressing complex thoughts and ideas through words became too time-consuming for bros. The meme, like the Wacky-Pack, took off. When I look at Wacky-Packs today, I smile because I recall the laughter we shared as young boys in school. I remember Thomas Pitcher drawing the most detailed versions of popular brands and then putting in one of our ideas — like the Fartos. Brainstorming some hilarious Wacky-Packs was a good day for us. Then, one day, we grew up, and that kind of humor lost its relevance in our lives.

The Wack-Pack mentality served Trump well. It transitioned into memes, and now it is how many Americans on the right choose their elected officials.

Good God in Heaven — what has happened to us?