Joe Biden Was Our First Meme President

Welcome to BTW, a newsletter on all things Internet culture and technology. Here, I discuss an in-depth issue or trend in social media or the tech industry with my eye on what you need to know to be informed on the matter.

⏰ TL;DR:

• On Sunday, July 21, President Joe Biden announced he would not be seeking re-election in the 2024 U.S. President Election

• Leading up to this announcement, many memes were shared making fun of his lackluster debate performance.

• Other memes indicated Democrats were throwing support behind his Vice-President, Kamala Harris.

• As a meme-able figure in politics over the years, we can look back at the jokes created in his honor (and at his expense) to understand larger political and internet culture shifts.

I don’t get to write a lot of meme scholarship anymore now that the bulk of my time is spent in Creator and Platform Studies, but in my Ph.D. program Meme Studies was one of my first loves. I even have a chapter on Harambe memes in my dissertation. Enjoy today’s piece!

What Happened?

On Sunday, July 21, President Joe Biden announced he will not run against former President Donald Trump in the 2024 U.S. election. After a disastrous debate at the end of June, many doubted if Biden, 81, was fit for four more years of the most demanding job on the planet. Many called it ageist; many others recognized the pain of having to take responsibilities away from aging parents and grandparents. Additionally, Biden has become increasingly unpopular with young voters in the Democratic Party due to a whole host of issue - inflation, failure to engage in meaningful action on abortion and reproductive healthcare rights, the weak fight against Republicans seeking to stop student debt relief, and his backing of Israel during the genocide in Gaza.

Ever sine the June debate, Joe Biden has become the stuff of memes. Literally. Internet users made jokes about his dazed and lethargic demeanor, or commented on how his stature seemed unable to keep up with Donald Trump. With so much riding on the 2024 election, many came to believe Joe Biden was not the man for the job.

As I’ve written before in this newsletter, individual memes are fun and funny, but the process, creation, and spread of memes, something in Internet Studies known as memetics, are much more interesting. Memetics focuses on the cultural, technological, historical, and political threads involved in meme-making, and if we look at those here, Joe Biden, the Meme President, emerges.

Joe Biden, the Meme President

Joe Biden is no stranger to memes. Eight years ago, after Donald Trump won the 2016 election, internet made memes of then Vice-President Biden and President Obama to grapple with Trump’s victory. As President Obama made speeches calling for unity and to give Trump a chance during a peaceful transition of power, these memes were used to imagine a different story behind the scenes - one in which VP Biden attempts to thwart Trump’s success.

The memes were incredibly silly, but as the country tried to understand what a Trump presidency would look like, they were a coping mechanism. We needed to laugh at something, and it was fun to imagine a world in which Joe Biden was working behind the scenes to make things difficult for Trump in humorous ways.

But these memes did something else. They allowed us to remember Joe Biden fondly. Between these memes, his well-known obsession with ice cream, and Twitter (now X’s) claims that young Joe Biden was hot, Biden faded from the national political scene with many saying they wished he had run against Trump in 2016 (he did not, as his son, Beau, had recently passed away from brain cancer).

Let’s fast forward. In 2020, Biden defeats Donald Trump to become the 46th president, and the memes don’t stop. Namely, Dark Brandon, emerges during his presidency.

If you’re unfamiliar, we have to take a little bit of a walk to get to Dark Brandon, but bear with me: In September 2021, conservatives at sporting events took to chanting “Fuck Joe Biden” in the stands at events. On October 2, 2021, spectators at Talladega Raceway in Alabama did the chant, with a sports reporter incorrectly summarizing the chant as, “Lets’s Go Brandon.” The misheard phrase spread like wildfire and became a “coded” way for conservatives to publicly say “fuck Joe Biden" in places where the word “fuck” wouldn’t be kosher.

Shortly thereafter, the meme morphed, as memes often do. Progressives co-opted “Brandon” as synonymous with Biden, and created the “Dark Brandon” meme to mock the conservative meme Dark MAGA (Trump’s slogan of “make American great again). The Biden communications team ran with it, incorporating Dark Brandon jokes into the White House Correspondence Dinner speech and selling merch with “Dark Joe Biden” on it.

But at this point, the Biden memes weren’t landing the way they were in 2016. Many thought it was cringe for the President’s team to officially embrace it. Others thought that while still grappling with a global pandemic, meme-ing from the presidency was inappropriate. Both are true. Additionally, many of the things Biden promised during his campaign were coming up short, and many Democrats were becoming disenfranchised with the president. We didn’t need memes to cope with the presidency the way we did in 2016. Democrats were in office now, they needed to do something meaningful with their power. Memes are a powerful coping mechanism to insert humor where there isn’t any and to make us feel as if we have some control in an otherwise absurd, uncontrollable situation. As such, they were being used to grapple with other things at the time, not the presidency. Furthermore, this felt like a political instance of memejacking, or the use of grassroots internet memes by corporations. Nothing will kill a joke faster than it being used by something for commercial purposes, be it consumerism or politics.

Shitposting Biden To Drop Out

On the Internet, the term shitposting is used to refer to posting content that is intentionally absurd, provocative, or even offensive. It is similar to trolling, but shitposting often doesn’t have the intent behind it that trolling does. Shitposting is often its name - posting “shit” content to be intentionally absurd and not contribute much meaning to conversations. And in the days following the disastrous June 2024 presidential debate, Twitter users took to the platform to shitpost - but not on Joe Biden, but his Vice-President, Kamala Harris.

I could do a whole post on Kamala’s role and the internet culture response during the Biden Presidency, but I’ll stick to this - last year, when giving a speech, Harris said, “Do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” Now, in context, ironically, the quote makes sense. But as with most things on the internet, those two sentences became the soundbite, and when it was first released, was used to mock Harris. But after the June debate, the quote became a rallying cry known as #OperationCoconutTree, in which social media users made memes based in the quote showing their support for Kamala Harris as a presidential candidate.

Some of these memes used famous political sayings. Others used popular meme templates (such as Sarah Jessica Parker writing at her laptop as Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City).

Other memes were more remixed and more absurd. Some blended other popular media from 2024, such as The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, whereas others parodied the early 2000s film The Matrix in a purposefully bad aesthetic.

In short, this quote went from something that Harris was mocked for into a rallying cry for heavily online internet users of the Democratic Party. While absurd, the memes also became a statement of what people want and a cry for help for key Democratic leaders to take beating Donald Trump seriously.

Why Does This Matter?

Memes are always a barometer of public opinion. And while no social media site can stand in for the entirety of public opinion, internet content does have the power to sway conversations. People, including people in decision-making capacities, pay attention to online conversations to understand what constituents may want. As these memes continued to spread, key leaders in the Democratic Party began calling on President Biden to step aside in favor of Kamala Harris.

And on July 21, Joe Biden announced he would not be running in the 2024 election.

Did we shitpost Biden out of the election? Yes and no. Obviously these last few memes didn’t make him do anything, and it’s a much bigger decision than listening to pseudonymous strangers on the internet. But again, when we think of memetics over memes, we can see how the process of making, sharing, and liking memes indicates something bigger than individual memes themselves. #OperationCoconutTree showed that voters wanted something different.

Much has been said about memes in politics. Pundits and academics alike love to talk about it. We often hear that conservatives and political extremists have been better at the meme game than Democrats. Even I have said this in my book, The Internet is for Cats. But, when we look back at Joe Biden’s 21st century political career, and the role memes played in it, I don’t think we can say that conservatives necessarily or always do this better anymore.

Even in the conservative space, it has been individuals, not necessarily institutions, that have the best memes. And when we look at Joe Biden, we can see where some powerful ones have emerged. The claim that liberals can’t meme ignores the silly, the shitposting, and the powerful, and treats memes as something inherently villainous by “the other side.” That’s inaccurate. Memes can tell a story of a presidency and memorialize politicians and their legacies in the twenty-first century.

Sure, Donald Trump and his supports embraced internet culture to win the 2016 election. But that was now eight years ago, and different political and digital sensibilities have emerged. Looking back at memes of Joe Biden over the years, we can see those shifts happen.

In 1939, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the first president to appear on television. President Obama was the first U.S. president to appear on social media. And Joe Biden may very well have been our first meme president.

📚 Academic Readings to Learn More

• “Facebook Framing of the First Female U.S. Vice-President: An Intersectional Approach to Analyzing Memes Depicting Kamala Harris” (2024): Dorothy M. Bland, Mia Moody-Ramirez, Gheni Platenburg, Mira Lowe, & Lawrence Mosley.

• “Living Through It: Anger, Laughter, and Internet Memes in Dark Times” (2021): Hollis Griffen.

• “Memeing Politics: Understanding Political Meme Creators, Audiences, and Consequences on Social Media” (2023): Audrey Halversen & Brian E. Weeks.

👀 Things I’m Keeping My Eye On This Week

• Instagram is expanding and testing a variety of features on their app, including expiring and semi-private comments, and highlighting the messaging feature on the app over the create feature. (The Verge).

• Microsoft says 8.5 million devices were affected by the Crowdstrike outage. (Tech Crunch).

• Meta suspends its generative AI tools in Brazil (Reuters).