Like Biden himself, it’s everything Trump and his memes are not. Biden’s longest-running pop culture image, that of an older gent enjoying a vanilla cone, barely offers a counter to the hyper-aggressive “America, fuck yeah!” vibes of the average Trump meme. The folksy, homespun Biden who calls out “malarkey” and claims to have told Vladimir Putin he has no soul isn’t a persona that easily lends itself to a political meme culture that now, more than ever, relies on layers of irony. Not even Saturday Night Live could create a parody of Biden that didn’t sink under the weight of Biden’s own perceived blandness. His detractors, on the other hand, easily beat them to it by depicting him as “ Creepy Uncle Joe.” Although “ Sexy Joe Biden” is a whole thing, it never truly reemerged as a meme in the post-Obama era. If Obama-era Biden resided somewhere between a neighborly Dad and a dril tweet, during his election campaign, Biden’s public persona was so staid and buttoned-up it seemed to do nothing to inspire his supporters to memeify him. The Onion famously popularized a parodied, souped-up version of Biden colloquially known as “Diamond Joe” - an everyman in a ponytail who liked Dude Things like motorcycles, tinkering with his Trans Am, and cooling his heels in Mexico for a while. While serving as vice president during the Obama administration, the internet embraced him as a fun-loving, relatable sidekick.
It works whether you read it ironically or not.īy contrast, Joe Biden’s image in internet culture has long been malleable. That’s because so much of their ideology and methodology involves coded language, dog whistles, and a grandiose aesthetic that melds easily with the kind of humor you can never be sure is real. This kind of imagery has always served Trump and his supporters well, across levels of online fluency. Since the 2015–16 “Deplorables” era of Trump memeing, images produced by his supporters have evoked the former president as a testosterone-fueled Rambo-style warrior, boldly riding tanks or giant bald eagles toward a hyperbolic victory over the libs, flags waving. Joe Biden is a famously innocuous public figure. There’s a lot to unpack in a meme about an old dude with Godzilla eyes, so let’s sally forth. Is there anything we can do about that? Should we even try? The irony that attaches to memes of this nature is often used, especially by the far right, to obscure and distort their underlying point - and can raise confusion about whose aims the memes are ultimately serving. But like so much of the internet these days, the wholesome appeal masks a much more shadowy history. On the surface this may all just look like good, clean superhero fun. #DarkBrandon /uEmBuxGCVR- _ August 8, 2022 The Deep State told Biden he could not withstand The Storm.īiden replied, I am the Storm.
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