Susan Dell, the Internet's New Punchline: What Have We Become?

I have seen some peculiar things online in my time.

Grown adults arguing with cartoon frogs.

Lizard people in expensive suits.

Three-hour feuds with strangers whose profile picture is a potato.

But the past week may have topped the lot.

If you've seen it, you know.

Susan Dell, wife of Dell founder Michael Dell, stood beside Donald Trump in the Oval Office on 7 October to talk about money for children.

Quite a lot of money, as it happens.

The Dells have pledged $6.25 billion towards the Trump Accounts scheme, putting cash into investment accounts for 25 million American kids.

She even had a practical message: parents and grandparents, please claim your child's account, because there is money in them.

Within hours, nobody remembered a word of it.

The money?

The children?

The point of the meeting?

Lost in the fog.

Six billion, two hundred and fifty million dollars.

Enough to give millions of children a financial head start before they've even learnt to drive, let alone discovered the joys of blowing a week's wages on takeaway.

A perfectly respectable subject for discussion, you'd think.

You'd be wrong.

Instead, the internet decided the story was her face.

The meme factory opens for business

It started, as these things do, with a single post on 7 October: “okay but we need to talk about Susan Dell”.

Reader, we did.

Relentlessly.

By the next day there were more than 21,000 posts mentioning her on X alone.

Across the week, nearly 60,000.

Robot.

Clone.

Alien.

The simulation is glitching, someone needs to hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete.

An NPC waiting for her dialogue prompt.

Someone even worked out that Dell sells computers, so naturally she became a hardware upgrade.

Then came the “Mar-a-Lago face” diagnosis, the side-by-side photos, the Halloween costume guides, the Comic Con cosplay and, I kid you not, a skeleton yard decoration.

One outlet noted that within 48 hours she had gone from viral moment to think piece to Halloween costume.

That has to be some kind of record.

The AI crowd joined in too, with gender-swaps and face mash-ups, and at one point Grok confidently identified her as Brigitte Macron.

Even the machines were confused.

It went global.

French, Greek and Indonesian outlets all picked it up.

And this wasn't even the first time.

A clip from a White House visit last December did the rounds, and Reddit was asking questions back in July.

Trump didn't exactly help by asking whether she was thinking of running for office, because he would endorse her.

Michael Dell's answer was one word: “No.”

Honestly, the most sensible contribution of the entire week.

Confession time

Now, before I climb onto my high horse, I should admit something.

When I first saw the footage, I was terrified.

Not mildly surprised.

Properly startled, cup-of-tea-halfway-to-mouth startled.

And yes, I gave my opinion.

In close circles.

Where I fully assumed it would stay, along with my views on other people's wedding outfits.

So I'm not writing this from a cloud of moral superiority.

I didn't float above it.

I was in the group chat.

And yes, I am aware of the irony of putting memes in a column about stopping the memes.

I'll own that.

Consider it Exhibit A.

Because that's exactly how it works.

One person makes a joke.

Another improves it.

Someone makes a comparison, someone else makes a video, and before you know it millions of strangers are treating a real woman as a community art project.

The jokes I understand.

The sheer stamina, I do not.

At what point does a joke stop being a joke and turn into a public humiliation ritual?

I'd suggest somewhere around the skeleton in the front garden.

And before anyone says she's rich enough to cope, wealth buys you a very nice house to hide in.

It doesn't make the internet any kinder when you open your phone.

Enter the podcast bros

Then the microphones arrived.

REAL AF with Andy Frisella ran a whole segment on her appearance at the White House in episode 1066, on 9 October.

Lionel Nation weighed in with an episode promising to explain why Susan Dell “fascinates us” and “scares the hell out of us”.

Breaking Absurdity did a “Susan Dell Jump Scare” episode, then followed up with theories on why she looks the way she does, while admitting that nobody actually knows.

Which rather gives the game away, doesn't it?

Nobody knows.

But there's an hour to fill and a thumbnail to sell.

I'm not putting words in anyone's mouth here.

I'm simply pointing out that a philanthropist's face has become a content category.

That's the podcast-bro business model in a nutshell.

Find a clip.

Add a dramatic headline.

Invite the boys to speculate.

Let the algorithm do the rest.

No story required.

Just a target.

And the targets never get a right of reply, because by the time anyone thinks to ask, the bros have moved on to the next clip.

To be fair, it isn't only the bros.

Plenty of the pile-on came from women, from ordinary accounts, from everyone.

But the bros turned it into a format, and the format exposes the culture.

A woman stands up to talk about billions for children, and the loudest men in the room want to talk about whether she looks real.

The internet's surgeons are not surgeons

Let's be very clear about one thing.

Nobody knows whether Susan Dell has had any cosmetic work.

It is unverified.

“Mar-a-Lago face” is speculation, not a diagnosis.

One surgeon quoted in the coverage suggested makeup and weight loss.

Others have suggested lighting, angles and age.

I'm not going to diagnose a stranger from a video clip, and neither should you.

Yet a guess, repeated 60,000 times, starts to look like a fact.

That's the internet's oldest party trick.

And there's a familiar double standard humming underneath.

Men in power can look tired, heavy, grey or frankly crumpled, and we talk about their policies.

Women get a public referendum on their faces.

Even the quotes are fake

As if the memes weren't enough, the fake statements arrived.

A supposed South Park teaser about her racked up more than half a million views.

It's fake.

It was flagged as fake.

So is the “Susan Dell” reply to it.

So is the “Susan Dell” tweet threatening legal action.

And the touching line doing the rounds, supposedly from Michael Dell, about being the one who gets to wake up next to her?

Unverified.

It came from someone else's Instagram post, not his account.

Lovely sentiment.

Not his words, as far as anyone can tell.

For the record, as of this week, neither Susan nor Michael Dell has said anything at all.

Which means the only real voices in this entire saga are ours.

That's a sobering thought.

Out of control

So here's where I've landed.

I laughed.

I gasped.

I had my moment.

Then I watched it become costumes, cosplay, garden ornaments, fake cartoons, fake quotes and podcast segments.

And somewhere along the way it stopped being funny and started being something else.

Susan Dell is not a fictional character.

She is not a computer-generated prop placed in the Oval Office for our amusement.

She is a woman, a mother of four, who stood up to give money away.

Money doesn't buy you a separate nervous system.

A few people did say it.

“Leave the poor woman alone.”

“We need to be kinder.”

They were drowned out by the next meme.

That's the bit that gets me.

The decent voices were there all along.

They just didn't get the views.

Kindness, it turns out, is terrible for engagement.

Make your jokes about her politics if you like.

Question the programme.

Argue about the donation.

But a human being got turned into a Halloween costume in under 48 hours.

And I helped, just a little, in a group chat.

So, honestly, hand on heart:

What have we become?

And Remember:

Trust no Single Source

Trust Your Gut

and Stay Curious

Sally Joe

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