President-elect Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that one of his top donors, Elon Musk, will co-lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. It's a not-even-thinly-veiled nod to the popular Doge meme, depicting a cute Shiba Inu, which is also the inspiration behind the meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin. The commission, which will advise Trump, isn't an actual government department ' those have to be affirmed by Congress. But Musk seems to have successfully turned a joke he made on X in August into an actual advisory role in the Trump administration. The meme itself is simple. It references a Shiba Inu, a breed of hunting dog from Japan. The dog, who's named Kabosu, captured the internet's hearts by being exceptionally cute, similar to other, older animal-themed memes like Grumpy Cat. Its owner, a kindergarten teacher in Japan, first posted a picture of Kabosu in 2010, but the Doge meme went viral in 2013 when people added multicolored Comic Sans-styled text to...
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