Inside the Great American Meme Wars
All that matters are memes
In the moments after former president Donald J. Trump narrowly escaped an AR-15-style rifle bullet to the brain in Butler, Pennsylvania, my thoughts drifted 400 miles east to the sprawling, sandy shores of Wildwood, New Jersey. More specifically, I thought of the 2.5-mile stretch of boardwalk that hugs the swell of the Atlantic Ocean.
Wildwood, New Jersey is kitsch embodied, no place more so than the boardwalk. Colors come in shades of saltwater taffy and garish neon lights. It is a world deep-fried, a million rigged games of chance waiting to snatch whatever cash you have on hand. Wildwood never pretends to be something it’s not, free of the air of pretension that engulfs wealthier neighbors like Avalon and Stone Harbor. It is the Jersey Shore at its absolute finest.
Discounting the sheer Americana seeping from the Wildwood boardwalk and gun violence in general, I realize that the concepts of political assassination and Mid-Atlantic holiday may seem diametrically opposed. But one thing neatly unites the two, and it’s That Photo. I’m not sure that That Photo has a catchy title yet, though surely it will someday. At the moment, Wikipedia simply refers to it as “Donald Trump Raised-Fist Photograph”. But that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and the point is ultimately moot because you knew exactly what image I had in mind the moment I wrote “That Photo”.
Certain images are so powerful, so perfectly composed that they haunt our collective memory for generations. They are unplannable moments. Like a bullet that whizzes by your ear instead of killing you instantly, they are beautiful1 strokes of dumb luck. Everyone knows the wistful, hardened stare of Dorthea Lange’s “Migrant Mother”, and we all remember those triumphant faceless soldiers Joe Rosenthal captured raising the flag on Iwo Jima. Our understanding of conflicts during the Vietnam War are inextricable from the naked cries of Nick Ut’s “Napalm Attack”, the fear in Eddie Adams’ “Saigon Execution”, and the stoic all-consuming flames of Malcolm Browne’s “Burning Monk”. Despite long-term concerted efforts from the Chinese government to censor any discussion over Tiananmen Square, their stifling cannot compete against the mightiness of that nameless protester caught standing in the path of battle tanks by Jeff Widener.
As I’m sure you’re well aware by now, That Photo is one of those images. Regardless of what the future holds, it will come to encapsulate the post-pandemic, post-truth chaos that is 2024 America. It has been a month since the photographer snapped the shutter, and I have already seen That Photo ten million billion times, conservatively. Internet personality Adin Ross has already gone through the trouble of gifting Trump a Cybertruck with That Photo emblazoned across the side. You can buy yourself commemorative coins with That Photo engraved into “gold”2.
I knew from the first view that Wildwood, New Jersey would LOVE That Photo.
Being the shameless capitalist playground that it is, boardwalk economy thrives on trends. The flashing lights of roller coasters and Ferris wheels may draw in crowds, but its dozens of humble souvenir shops that keep the blood pumping summer after summer. A million Pokémon plushies stare with lifeless eyes, and the Ricks and/or Mortys that fill claw machines are sold at an upcharge for those who fail to win the unwinnable.
What you’ll see, more so than anything else, are the t-shirt stores, which proudly display the most unhinged apparel you can imagine.
I am not exactly sure how vendors decide what to print on t-shirts for upcoming summer traffic. I tried sending out some emails to the few vendors with listed email addresses, but none answered. And why would they? These stores have never felt the need to branch into e-commerce, and they probably never will. Their business is in the here and now. They are something tangible, for the person who desperately needs something, anything, right this moment to keep covered from the merciless sun or the leering eyes of pink potbellied men.
But I have a theory.
In biology, the continuation of a species relies solely on that species’ ability to reproduce. An organism can have all sorts of incredibly stupid flaws, but so long as it can survive long enough to reproduce and kickstart the next generation, those stupid flaws don’t really matter3. “Good enough” is all that’s necessary to get by.
The t-shirt designs function in sort of a similar way, I think. The only rhyme or reason that dictates the madness that gets printed onto boardwalk t-shirts is sellability. However uninspired or conceptually moronic a design concept is doesn’t matter, so long as someone is willing to buy it.
Some designs are evergreen – red hoodies that read LIFEGUARD in big bold letters, stuff with slogans like “my favorite people call me [insert grandparent pet name of choice]!” Others unintentionally provide snapshots of prevailing popular opinion. You can see queer lifestyles and identities slowly but surely gain increased mainstream acceptance summer after summer through the growing quantity of rainbow garb laid out for sale. The fact that those rainbows hang next to crude shirts that read “I’m not gay, but $20 is $20!”, however, serves as a poignant reminder that there’s still a lot of room for societal growth. For years, potheads had little more than the stray Rastafarian-themed Bob Marley t-shirt to hint at their proclivities. In 2024 – just three years after New Jersey legalized recreational cannabis – you can find a t-shirt showcasing Baby Yoda smoking a big fat blunt with relative ease.
Speaking of which, Baby Yoda himself touches on exactly what the Wildwood boardwalk is at its core – a microcosm of memes, manifested in the real world. The vast majority of what you see for sale has little to say at all, instead simply drawing on popular trends.
Some are transient in nature. When I visited last summer, everything centered around Barbie. I distinctly remember a summer season twelve or thirteen years ago, during the rise of The Big Bang Theory, in which my beach-going friends and I faced a near-constant bombardment of “BAZINGA”s. Others draw on nostalgia, a safer bet in an age where fads flare up and fade out at hyperspeed. Spongebob and Goku coexist side-by-side, subjected to absurdist scenarios, appealing to those seeking childhoods lost in a seaside cotton candy wonderland. Vendors take note of what works for their neighbors, and blatant copies of designs spread like viruses across storefronts.
As you might expect, the Wildwood boardwalk loves Trump.
Why, you ask? It’s true that wearing his name across your chest does make a statement, just as much as any rainbow or joint-smoking Baby Yoda does. It’s also true that Cape May County (in which Wildwood resides) historically leans red4. And yes, Wildwood appeals to exactly the sort of working-class white guy who can’t afford a weeklong getaway to the state’s nicest beaches and are especially susceptible to the myth of “Make America Great Again”. But more so than anything, Trump merch kills it on the boardwalk because the man is so damn meme-able.
Somehow, he is both the living, breathing cartoon character you grew up with and that white-hot craze that burns so intensely and engulfs so completely that it (theoretically) can’t be sustained for more than a few fleeting moments. He speaks in catchphrases. His favorite form of punctuation is the middle finger. His platitudes and insults are imbued with a cadence and diction uniquely his own5. He is the pissing Calvin bootleg decal6 come to life. And just like his crude comic-strip counterpart, he has an endless, acrid stream of urine at the ready to unleash in blatant, juvenile acts of disdain toward any and all who tick him off.
Of course, this condition curses the afflicted to never feel the relief and contentment of a calm heart or an empty bladder. But many Americans feel that true contentedness is something unattainable, and are eager to embrace the satisfaction of a good long degrading piss on the world as a suitable consolation prize. Trump has an innate understanding of how to convey this core concept in his every action and expression, and it shines through in just about every photograph he is captured in.
Really, he didn’t need a once-in-a-lifetime combination assassination attempt/photo-op misconstruing a lucky break with superhuman strength to bolster his presidential campaign. He already had an inarguably iconic photo to serve as meme fodder in his 2023 mugshot, courtesy of some nameless Fulton County Jail employee. Subverting the long-established booking photo formula with a downcast shadow and an obstinate pout, it has come to represent the man and the movement’s unwillingness to surrender7. The fist pumping in the air, the trickles of blood, the fluttering stars and stripes – it’s all a bit redundant.
Even so, it is the stuff memes are made of. I knew That Photo would be making the rounds across those Wildwood T-shirt shops in a matter of days, if not hours. If the fate of the United States rests entirely on the efficacy of a candidate’s political memes, the snap of that shutter in Butler, PA seemingly drove the final nail in the collective coffin.
But as time passes, I’m becoming less certain of a future predestined.
On July 21st – eight days after the assassination attempt, and the release of That fateful Photo – current US President Joe Biden released a statement announcing that he would not be seeking reelection after all. After a June 2024 debate performance that put the infamous OG 1960 JFK v. Nixon showdown led to a handful of national polls projecting near-certain democratic defeat, it became abundantly clear that the current commander-in-chief was no longer a viable candidate for reelection.
Many attribute this to the president’s advanced age and declining mental acuity (never mind that the same labels can just as easily be applied to his opponent). But if you really want to get to the crux of the probmel, Joe Biden is relatively Boring and Normal, which does not sell t-shirts on the boardwalk on hot summer days. Try as you might, you’ll struggle to find Biden’s name8 or likeness in Wildwood, NJ.
To be clear, it’s not a bad thing that Joe Biden is Boring and Normal. It’s just that Boring and Normal is incompatible with an election almost exclusively determined by the quality of the memes it produces. Biden is a man whose defining personal trait is a love for vanilla ice cream, the most common flavor of perhaps the world’s most beloved dessert. He’s from Delaware, a state so boring that I’ve really only driven through it despite the fact that I spent a decent chunk of my life just 20 minutes from its border.
Biden’s politics are Boring and Normal too. He has been a moderate all his life. It’s the platform he relied on to win the 2020 election. He never truly excited voters. But presented with a compelling onslaught of memes illustrating the alternative of an incumbent Trump rapidly plummetting into Absolute Madness, the people of the Untied States determined that Boring and Normal was slightly preferable
But Boring and Normal just doesn’t cut it, and the president has failed to adapt to the changing times.
Biden first entered politics in 1970 – six years before Richard Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene and first coined the term “meme”. He is the lingering last remenant of a generation of politicians that didn’t have to consider the goings-on of virtual worlds, of realms where visual media is truly inescapable. As such, his fatal flaw came in the form of following the footsteps of his predecessors and trusting the press to communicate his merits to the American public.
But dying press corps are slaves to memes just as much as the politicians they cover. When success is tied to how many clicks you can garner, no one wants Boring and Normal. It is the outrageous and scandelous that performs best. For the sin of placing trust in the press as a communicative middleman when when technology and misinformation has made it nearly impossible to truly trust anything at all, Biden has been fucking crucified.
Perhaps the most painful aspect of this tragic downfall has been Biden’s inability to combat in anyway against this betrayal, because he (and the people around him) do not understand the language or power of memes. The most successful Biden-based memes sprung up during his tenure as Barack Obama’s VP, when the sweet summer children of a Twitter not yet completely corrupted created little vignettes of Biden as Barack’s lovable, somewhat goofy sidekick who’d sometimes utter silly outdated words like “Malarky!”
It was cute, and Biden has said that he thought it was cute. I wouldn’t be shocked if Biden still thinks of memes as cute little inside jokes of relatively little consequence, relegated to forums no one will ever read. And sometimes, they are just that.
However, as we’ve all learned over the course of the last decade, they are also very much capable of being more than that. They are reflections of perception, and part of running for public office in 2024 is learning to harness them in your favor is of upmost importance. Against Trump, a man capable of turning something as innocuous as a red hat into hypernationalist iconography9, he never stood a chance.
But from the ashes of a campaign vanquished, a reinvented Kamala Harris has risen.
In the late 00s reality television hit Jersey Shore, the beloved10 cast members, in fits of anger, often accused one another of being “The Fakest One in the House”. To be The Fakest One in the House is to be duplicitous, dishonest, and inauthentic. The Fakest One in the House will say words that don’t align with their true feelings or intentions.
During the jam-packed 2020 Democratic primary race, much of the public seemed to view Kamala Harris as a strong contender for the title of The Fakest One in the House. It started after the very first debate, when Harris claimed to support the implementation of universal healthcare, only to immediately walk back on her stance. Her vows to enact criminal justice reform and correct racial inequity were seen as hypocritical given her past as a prosecutor in California, a state whose aggressive tough-on-crime political culture has disproportionately impacted communities of color. Lighthearted jokes about smoking marijuana in her youth didn’t sit well with those long angered by her oversight of nearly 2,000 marijuana convictions11 as a San Francisco DA paired with her active objection to California’s Proposition 19 ballot initiative in 2010.
In conjunction, these inconsistencies made it difficult for prospective voters to parse out Kamala’s true ideological loyalties. Contradiction ultimately pushed away progressive and moderate democrats alike. Furthermore, while she faced a habitual liar in Trump, there has always been something very real in his unwillingness to censor himself or apologize for any misstep. At the time, Harris showed no such authenticating attribute, no defining trait that remained consistent regardless of what came out of her mouth12. As a result, her campaign folded before primary voting had even started.
But something crucial changed shortly after she was appointed to the role of Biden’s second-in-command – she began to laugh. Like, really laugh.
In writing, it doesn’t sound like much. One study I came across claims that the average adult laughs about 18 times per day13. It is something universal, something many of us do without thinking twice. But Kamala Harris – when she really lets loose, anyway – has one of those boisterous, infectious cackles, the kind many women would restrain among mixed company for fear of some harsh unspoken judgment. She’s got a big toothy smile that kind of unconsciously forces you to smile back. Her eyes crinkle, and her crow’s feet shamelessly show. When she thinks something is really funny, she’ll throw her head back and howl or bury uncontrollable chuckles into her hands. Her whole body trembles. Sometimes, she laughs at things that aren’t really funny at all, as if they’re a part of some inside joke that only she understands (for instance, Venn diagrams). But even in those moments, her hysterical laughter paradoxically transmutes the unfunny into something laughworthy.
Trump, it seems, has struggled to effectively counter this incredibly human trait his opponent so brazenly flaunts. Hers is the antithesis of Trump’s laugh, which is rarely heard and often little more than a fleeting smirk or snort. They are incapable of inspiring absurdist comedy, instead usually reserved for statements made at the expense of others. Trying to recreate the magic of demeaning nicknames past a la “Lyin’ Ted” or “Crooked Hilary” or “Sleepy Joe”, he’s taken to calling her “Laughin’ Kamala”14. “It’s the laugh of a lunatic!!” Trump proclaimed at a Pennsylvania rally between matter-of-fact claims of being a better-looking person than his adversary and heated accusations that she harbors communist ideals.
At worst, Kamala’s laughs may be something phony, an act orchestrated to endear her to the public. Maybe the public perception of her in 2019, when so many pinned her as the Fakest Person in the House, was spot on. But ultimately, the sincerity of it all doesn’t especially matter. What matters is that the performance (genuine or not) is effective enough to accomplish the job of humanizing Harris. And more importantly, it’s fodder for memes seemingly capable of standing a fighting chance in a situation that seemed set in stone just a few weeks ago.
For the past few years, Kamala soundbites have quietly circulated online, oftentimes via right-leaning accounts attempting to showcase the vice president at her nuttiest. Over the last six months specifically, these criticisms have been effectively co-opted to create a Kamala Harris persona that people find endearing. The term “wine mom” pops up time and time again to describe this new Kamala15. A wine mom, lacking inhibitions, doesn’t always get the words right. A wine mom can be embarrassing in her attempts to connect with a younger crowd through some poorly executed dance move. Wine moms laugh a bit too loud. But at the core of it all, wine moms are fun, and they make us laugh. We forgive their cringe-worthy missteps because they’re trying to cope like the rest of us, to find reasons to celebrate despite their idiotic husbands and dying elders and money troubles and global pandemics and crumbling democracies.
And you know who loves wine moms, perhaps more so than anyone? The Wildwood boardwalk, and all of the places scattered around the country just like it.
About five hours after Biden announced his withdrawal, a group of men were spotted sporting Kamala crop tops on Fire Island. A cloying shade of yellow-green, they were styled after the album cover of club-pop artist Charli XCX’s most recent, universally acclaimed release, Brat. Almost as quickly as the shirts were printed, they went viral.
Within an hour of the Fire Island post, Charli XCX made the following statement:
According to the artist, to be “brat” is to be the following:
“You’re just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes. Who feels herself but maybe also has a breakdown. But kind of like, parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile. Like, does dumb things. But it’s brat. You’re brat. That’s brat.”
Which, let’s face it, aligns perfectly with the wine mom persona that some combination of campaign advisors and grassroot online political fandoms have been cultivating for years.
This proclamation – that Kamala IS brat – is significant because Gen Z, specifically, has a special affinity for Charli XCX16. They grew up with her music, after all – her debut album was released 11 years ago, half a lifetime ago for her biggest fans. Her organic, unprompted endorsement successfully accomplishes for Kamala Harris what Hilary Clinton tried (and failed) to do when she infamously pleaded for younger voters to “Pokemon Go to the polls”. Inadvertently, Kamala’s name has been attached to something both culturally relevant and strangely comforting, nostalgic in the same way as those familiar bootleg cartoon characters that sell so well on the boardwalk.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve witnessed a flood of Kamala Harris memes on all of my feeds that border on dada, like this one:
Marrying Kamala’s wacky laugh, her confusing “you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” catchphrase, and the fan-favorite Coconut Mall racecourse featured in 2008’s Mario Kart Wii, it touches on Gen-Z universal nostalgia while likely remaining close to incomprehensible to those over the age of 40. And that’s what makes it successful – it speaks in a secret language to long-sought-after young voters, in a tongue that elders stuck in tired tradition can’t make heads or tails of.
Or it’s successful enough, anyway. The pickings are slim, and much of the sudden rush to the #KHive is likely coming from a place of desperation. There’s an irony and self-awareness to many of the memes, an urgency screaming that there is no choice but to embrace the inadequacies, lest we all face certain doom. As I said earlier, the key to survival is – has always been – attaining “good enough”, not perfection.
Will a Kamalanominon17 be enough to flip the script? Honestly, I’m not sure. Hulk Hogans and Lil’ Johns go tit for tat for their candidate of choice, and it’s hard to say which will emerge the victor.
I couldn't make it down to Wildwood this year, so I can’t tell you exactly what you’ll see on the boardwalk in these dwindling summer days destined to die at the heels of a particularly anxiety-inducing Election Day.
I did, however, make it to the Skowhegan State Fair, along the banks of Maine’s Kennebec River. It is no Jersey shore. But sure enough, those same sorts of unlicensed, unregulated t-shirts flapped in the wind beside hot dog and lemonade stands.
I saw no signs of Harris gear in the makeshift tents shielding fold-out tables piled high with “I ♥︎ SLUTS” sweatshirts, though I did see one or two hastily modified yard signs around town, the word BIDEN mercilessly guillotined. But as anticipated, I saw plenty of That Photo, branded with words like FIGHT! and STRENGTH! showcased in big bold letters. My personal favorite sported phrases along the lines of “I’m voting FELON18 2024!”, a particularly demented combination of words that beautifully illustrate how inconsequential actual policy or basic morality has become. From what I can see in front of my eyes, very little has changed.
But in a parallel universe – one I cannot feel or touch – a different reality is emerging, albeit utilizing many of the same tried and true techniques to court support.
At this point, I am not sure which world is more real than the other.
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When I say beautiful, I mean this in a strictly aesthetic sense of the word – many of the most iconic, impactful photographs portray objectively horrible moments.
I could not confirm whether the commemorative coins contain any actual gold, for the record.
Koalas are a great example of this. Those arboreal idiots almost exclusively eat Eucalyptus, a diet nearly void of any nutrition and caloric density. On top of that, koalas will only eat about 5% of the 600 or so eucalyptus species available to them. They sleep for a minimum of 20 hours per day and have developed particularly small brains to accommodate their lack of energy intake. Many die prematurely because they grind their stupid teeth down to nubs and starve. Even so, they manage to reproduce generation after generation, passing down their ridiculous inefficiencies to their offspring.
Though New Jersey traditionally leans liberal, there are in fact heavily conservative areas. if you look at county voting demographics, the state itself looks as if it has a big blue scar running through its center – the sleepy northwestern mountain towns and the southeastern seaside communities remain red, occasionally joined by the southwestern farming communities in Gloucester, Cumberland, and Salem counties. The one outlier is Atlantic County, which understandably has some qualms specifically with Trump on a personal level.
I know that I probably should pretend to be impartial, but I have to admit that I, personally, think that Trump is an unhinged megalomaniac for the sake of illustrating the efficacy of his memes. Plethora of horrible qualities aside, he is almost certainly a rapist, and by virtue of not wanting to live life at the mercy of a rapist, there’s no conceivable scenario in which I’d consider voting for him. Nevertheless, in the privacy of my own home, I love to use the phrase “suckers and losers”, the terminology Trump infamously used to describe fallen soldiers during his presidency. Trump claims that he did no such thing, but everyone knows that he absolutely did because who the fuck else would even think to call dead people suckers and losers for something as universally inescapable as dying? The phrase is blunt, the words have a satisfying rhythm to them, the consonants and vowels contrast in a way that’s pleasing to the ear. A small part of me is disgusted every time it leaves my lips because it is attached to someone I find so morally reprehensible, but I do it anyway because I am ultimately a human. This is how powerful his words are.
Commonplace as they are, there is no such thing as an official Calvin pissing decal. Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Waterson actively hates these decals and always been against merchandising his intellectual property, actually. However, Waterson is aware that the pissing Calvins are outside of his control and seems to have come to peace with the fact that they will probably be his legacy.
Surrender to what? Common sense? The rules of society? Forward momentum? It’s anyone’s guess.
This statement is not quite true – you can pretty easily find merch proudly brandishing “FUCK BIDEN” in big bold letters. I guess I should say that it’s nearly impossible to find pro-Biden merch for sale in the wild.
As I said in the prior footnote, I can’t effectively pretend to be impartial about Trump because he just kind of thoroughly sucks. But one of the things I hate him for most is the fact that he has probably ruined red hats forever. The best hat to ever fit my head was a bright red Rochester, NY ballcap that I bought in 2015. I only got to wear it a few times before it was permanently sequestered to my closet. It has been nearly 10 years and I’m still angry about it.
(Beloved by me, at least.)
Though the convictions certainly had serious negative consequences on those impacted (i.e. impediments to finding employment or housing), it should be noted that only a small fraction of the individuals convicted served time in state jails.
Or, at the very least, it came too little too late – hints of Kamala 2024 are visible from time to time, in snarky moments such as the ones seen during last election cycle’s vice presidential debates.
Take this number with a grain of salt – the study was published by Frontiers Media, a potentially predatory publisher I wrote about in the context of bogus grounding studies last year.
Objectively terrible nickname – unlike the others, it doesn’t touch some intrinsic fundamental flaw in his opponent. Laughing is not in and of itself a bad trait for a leader to have, and in fact probably reflects some ability or desire to connect not often seen in the political elite. God, his rationale behind mocking her laugh is that it sounds like the hysterics of a mad woman – he could have used Crazy or Cooky to get across the same point AND reverse it into a negative attribute!!! 1/10, pathetic, can’t believe this came from the guy who coined “suckers and losers”.
The “wine mom” label has recently led to allegations from flustered Republicans that Harris suffers from a “drinking problem”. These appear to be nothing more than baseless rumors. To be 100% clear, I fully believe that Harris’ wine mom behavior has nothing to do with her alcohol consumption. If JD Vance can call Harris a cat lady without her owning a cat, I can call her a wine mom without implying that she’s an alcoholic.
Stylistically, Charli XCX is what you’d get if you developed an artificial intelligence, tinkered with it until it developed a soul and free will, then proceeded to train it on Daft Punk, Spice Girls, Lil Wayne, and some miscellaneous Myspace one-hit wonders. It’s not difficult to understand why people like her.
On the subject of Kamala Harris memes, you’ll also find plenty of KHive stans riffing off of any one of the singles from Chappell Roan’s unapologetically feminist, extremely gay, very popular breakthrough album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, which includes the single “Femininomenon”. If, in an alternate universe, Katy Perry continued kissing girls, went through a devastating breakup, and decided to cope with some Kate Bush and RuPaul’s Drag Race reruns, the result would probably be something close to Chappell Roan. Like Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell or Marty Robbin’s Gunfire Ballads and Trail Songs, every song on the album is an absolute banger. Considering Harris’ claims of offering something different from the generations of mediocre white men who have overpromised and underdelivered that came before her, Chappell Roan’s music is particularly effective at hammering home Kamala’s campaign goals.
Sometimes, “felon” is replaced with the equally deranged “convicted criminal”.