The Meme-ification of American Politics

In a video of the Air Force Academy’s graduation ceremony last June, Joe Biden, wearing a navy suit and a blue ball cap, shakes the hand of a smiling cadet before turning to walk back to his seat. But, instead of smoothly exiting stage left, the President takes an inelegant nosedive. “There are just too many clips of this man falling,” one commenter wrote on the TikTok account of NBC News, where a video of the incident has been viewed 2.5 million times. “I genuinely feel bad for him,” another said, displaying a pitying empathy that might make Biden’s advisers cringe. “Falling like this at his age is very serious,” the podcaster Robby Starbuck wrote in a post that included a full video of the incident. “He’s in no condition to run.” Brendon Leslie, a conservative media personality, tweeted a photo of Biden being helped up and wrote, “The state of America in one picture.”

It’s true that Biden, who is eighty-one, has seen his feet make an enemy of him from time to time. In March, 2021, after the President stumbled while climbing the stairs to board Air Force One, the New York Post aggregated the inevitable memes, including one that showed former President Donald Trump driving a golf ball that bopped Biden in the back of the head. In June, 2022, Biden fell off his bike during a ride near his vacation home, in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and the moment—which looked painful—was caught on camera by bystanders. In September, 2023, when the President momentarily lost his balance walking down the stairs of Air Force One, Fox News devoted an entire article to the near-stumble. Biden’s struggles with steps have become such a flash point that, last November, video shot from a distance of someone tumbling down the stairs of Air Force One, after the plane had landed in Poland, set off a wave of misinformation on social media that the tumbler had been Biden. The Associated Press issued a fact-check article about the incident, clarifying that its own reporters had watched Biden walk down the plane’s stairs unscathed.

Loss of balance is a normal part of the aging process. In Biden’s most recent physical, from February, 2023, the White House physician Kevin O’Connor issued the President a clean bill of health but noted that he has spinal arthritis, which, along with a foot injury, accounts for his stiff gait. Axios reported that Biden was wearing sneakers more, working out with a physical therapist to improve his balance, and that his team had found a shorter set of stairs for him to use when entering and exiting Air Force One. The White House has often dismissed news cycles involving the President’s battles with gravity as distractions from issues that voters are worried about, such as abortion access and prescription-drug costs. But polls consistently show that a large majority of Americans (and a majority of Democrats) think Biden is too old to be effective for another term in office. The President’s approval rating, meanwhile, just about matches what Trump’s was following Trump’s attempt to overturn the election on January 6, 2021. Inflation is down. The stock market is hitting record highs. Setting aside nebulous factors such as the “vibecession,” it seems reasonable to assume that Biden’s low favorability correlates with doubts about his age. Trump is seventy-seven and often rambling and shouty on the stump. And yet he seems much less affected by the question of age. Why? The answer might be, in a word, memes.

As the 2024 campaign gets under way, many Americans have tuned out current events. A 2023 Reuters Institute study found that only forty-eight per cent of respondents were “very” or “extremely” interested in the news, down from sixty-three per cent in 2017. News sites have seen a crash in traffic because of this fatigue. But at least half of American adults say they consume some news on social-media sites, according to the Pew Research Center. The share of adults who get their news from TikTok in particular has tripled since 2020; a third of adults under thirty regularly get their news from the platform. At the same time, Trump will be splitting his campaign schedule with court appearances, and Biden’s advisers seem to think that fewer outings mean fewer opportunities for falls, flubs, and gaffes. As a result, the 2024 election seems likely to be waged in a media environment where more and more voters are forming opinions based on the funny video their cousin’s husband’s sister shared in the group chat.

As Vice-President, Biden enjoyed years of friendly memes. His 2010 hot-mike moment telling former President Barack Obama that signing health-care reform into law was “a big fucking deal” solidified Biden as an easy caricature, plainspoken and emotional, a useful foil to the cool-tempered Obama. Two years later, Biden made a cameo appearance on the NBC hit show “Parks and Recreation,” the dénouement in a long-running gag that the Vice-President was the object of Leslie Knope’s lust. In 2014, images of Biden wearing his signature aviator sunglasses while eating an ice-cream cone and flashing two ten-dollar bills went viral. GQ put him in the category of “true swag masters.” Biden’s first-ever Instagram post featured aviators in the foreground and, in the background, a blurred image of him reading papers at his desk. The undertone of the aviator meme was the opposite of how Biden is so often portrayed today: here was a man aging well, coolly, the sort of preppy, fit grandfather who swims laps in the Rehoboth summer surf. In the days and weeks after the 2016 election, Democrats salved their wounds with memes of Biden and Obama as “best friends.”

But, by the time Biden ran against Trump, in 2020, the Biden memes had curdled, with Trump himself setting the tone, tweeting, “Welcome to the race Sleepy Joe.” Conservative media has since helped amplify the idea that Biden is a slow-witted geezer. (Behind the scenes, Biden is reportedly detail-oriented with something of a quick temper.) Biden is, by any measure, old. But the provenance of some of the more alarmist Biden-is-feeble memes, many of them built on raw footage of a few stumbles, is murky. “I don’t know if they are part of coördinated messaging—I don’t know if they are grassroots sentiment,” Ryan Milner, a professor of communication at the College of Charleston who studies memes, told me. “My guess would be a combination of both.” But, Milner went on, conservative media figures such as Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder have been crucial in solidifying the perception that Biden’s faculties are seriously diminished. “Even if they’re not the ones starting the Biden-is-old thing, those folks are asking the questions and propagating the message.” Shapiro talked about Biden’s Air Force Academy fall on his show, saying that “Biden is a fragile elderly gentleman” who “could have fallen down and broken a hip and that could have become his decline to the coffin.”

Trump is another famously memed figure in American life. He entered the political fray as a fully formed cultural icon, a blusterer, a clown, an antidote to tasteful wealth. He has always lent himself to parody—he’s the rich guy in rap songs and “Home Alone 2”—but he has also asserted a certain agency over that exaggerated image. During the 2016 campaign, Trump was mocked for his weight and McDonald’s habit; his standard order, at least back then, was reportedly two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fishes, and a chocolate malted. When he hosted the championship Clemson Tiger football team at the White House, in 2019, he served a spread of McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Domino’s, and Burger King, a move that was affectionately memed by his supporters as proof that the President hadn’t lost his common touch. More recently, Trump was forced to take a mug shot in Fulton County, Georgia, where he is facing criminal charges for conspiring to overturn the state’s 2020 election result. When the picture was released—a glowering Trump, frozen in time under the glare of institutional lighting—his campaign quickly capitalized, selling T-shirts with the mug shot for thirty-six dollars.

It’s hard to caricature a caricature. Trump is only four years younger than Biden, but his bellicosity (to put it politely) has seemed to stave off accusations of senility. Would an enfeebled man, the logic seems to go, get in a testy fight with the judge in his Manhattan defamation trial? The Biden campaign, when asked to respond to the pervasive sentiment that Biden is too old for the Presidency, pointed to internal polling that shows three-quarters of their target voters don’t believe Donald Trump will be the G.O.P. nominee. The implication is, once voters realize Trump is a lock, they’ll remember what they found so unappealing about him.

Biden’s 2020 campaign was similarly not so much an assertion of what he stood for as a promise that he’d be the opposite of Trump. Now Biden supporters lament that voters aren’t paying attention to his accomplishments—the COVID-era American Rescue Plan, the infrastructure investments, the Inflation Reduction Act—but, in part, that’s because Biden promised a politics of calm. His main appeal was his old-white-man blandness: it meant that his supporters wouldn’t have to tune in to chaotic events. That created a perfect vacuum for right-wing memes. Right-wing views, Milner said, are more black-and-white, which makes the memes easier to create and arguably more effective. “You see this with a lot of the memes around gender stuff, because if, to you, gender is male, female, black and white, biologically binary, everything else outside of that is just silliness. It’s easy to make fun.”As the right-wing influencer Benny Johnson likes to say, “The left can’t meme. But we can.”

Not to say that the left hasn’t had some success in positively meme-ing Biden during his Presidency. Dark Brandon, a play on the pro-Trump “Let’s Go Brandon” meme—the roots of which are too complicated to explain here (basically, it’s a non-profane way to say, “Fuck Joe Biden”)—bubbled up on left-wing social media sometime in 2022. The meme typically featured Biden with lasers shooting from his eyes or lightning bolts from his hands, Emperor Palpatine style, and was meant to celebrate policy wins. It was a left-wing counter to the pervasive idea that Biden is feeble or confused; he was, in fact, an all-powerful dark lord. The Biden campaign now sells Dark Brandon T-shirts.

The White House has also attempted to counter the age question with humor. When Biden turned eighty-one, last November, a picture was posted to his Instagram account of the President happily seated before a birthday cake topped with a conflagration of candles. “Turns out on your 146th birthday, you run out of space for candles!” the caption read. The reaction was predictably mixed. “This is the most likable he’s been probably the whole time he’s been president,” a this publication team member said during one of the tabloid’s taped staff discussions about pop-culture news. Others weren’t so friendly. The conservative radio host Dana Loesch wrote on Twitter, “There’s a portal to hell on a plate in front of him.” ♦