Donald Trump reigns not only over American policy but also over the internet as a whole. Entertaining as his blatant ignorance is, it has become a challenge to go online without being accosted by an image of his face.
Naturally, there’s an app for that. Developer Tom Royal has a solution. He has developed a Google Chrome extension aptly called “Make America Kittens Again”. It automatically detects images of Trump on the web, and changes them to photos of kittens.
The product description explains itself: “Trump is a disgrace, kittens are lovely, and I couldn’t find a Creative Commons photo of a blobfish to use”. This works on most news sites, though it still has a few websites and social media sites yet to cover. The extension went viral in December 2016, around the time of Trump’s election to power.
Make America Kittens Again now also allows users to “kittensize” other politicians, like Steve Bannon, Mike Pence and Marine Le Pen. It’s certainly entertaining, and a refreshing change not have to look at Trump’s face every few minutes.
However, as Royal wrote in his blog, “I made it back in February [2016] when Trump was merely an annoyance; a particularly vile and shouty cartoon clown making a nuisance of himself ahead of the Republican primaries when, I hoped, he’d get knocked back to his career of real estate f***ery and reality TV bellowing. Obviously things didn’t turn out that way, and we’re looking down the barrel of four years of horror. No Chrome extension’s going to fix that, sadly.”
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