Within minutes of Biden’s Sunday afternoon withdrawal announcement, all eyes shifted to current Vice President Kamala Harris as the probable answer to the question of who the Democratic Party’s new presidential candidate nominee will be. In what seems like a never-ending July, the last two weeks alone have chronicled Trump’s brush with gun violence and his appointment of Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate, coupled with Biden’s coronavirus infection and subsequent exit from the race as the pendulum of United States politics swings back and forth between fever dream and nightmare.
With the met demand of Biden’s long-overdue departure from the 2024 election, the immediate rallying around Harris is accompanied by an onslaught of memes that are perhaps a coping mechanism for a jaded and afraid American public. As seen throughout her short-lived 2020 presidential campaign and in media coverage of her jovial, giggly persona as a part of Biden’s administration, Harris is no stranger to being the butt of the joke. In case we forgot, “We did it, Joe!” became a viral sensation as soon as the 2020 election results were in, with innumerable TikTok renditions and memes.
Most recently, and merely weeks ahead of Biden’s withdrawal, the Harris meme-o-sphere or whatever you want to call it became home to a new invasive species altogether — the coconut tree.
Practically ubiquitous, the coconut tree meme comes from a portion of Harris’s speech at a May 2023 ceremony for the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics, when she shared a brief anecdote about her mother.
“She would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us: ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree,’” Harris recalled in her speech, adding, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
And for whatever reason, people ran with that. More like sprinted, somersaulted, and did a tumbling routine into a split, by the looks of the sheer volume and complexity of coconut tree memes. The sound bite reportedly emerged in February, but edits and visual references have since spread like wildfire after Biden’s poor performance during his first presidential debate with Trump late last June, paired with memes of Harris manifesting a candidacy nomination.
Unlike its predecessors, which needled Harris’s “tough-on-crime” prosecutorial legacy as the San Francisco District Attorney and Attorney General of California, or poked fun at her rendition of “Wheels on the Bus,” the coconut tree meme has gone from ironic to iconic, and the Kamala campaign is riding that wave like its life depends on it. Her digital re-characterization from self-proclaimed “Top Cop,” which definitely contributed to tanking her ratings among young voters in 2019, to unfavorably regarded vice president, to a hybrid goofy wine aunt and girlboss queen in our time of utter desperation has been equal parts remarkable and jarring — especially since both right- and left-wing media and commentators mock her extensively for said personas.
It’s also the way in which the coconut tree memes have been forcibly entwined with pop culture, from various edits sampling the quote throughout top 40 hits to British singer and producer Charli XCX’s timely endorsement of the vice president amid her viral brat (2024) summer, that postures Harris as a Gen-Z “Shero” who will save us from Trump so that we can keep bumpin’ that.
I’ve seen some informal arguments that Harris behaves the way she does, bubbly, silly, and approachable, in response to Trump’s deployment of the “angry Black woman” trope against her that far-right voters have capitalized on. I’ve also seen people allege that “wine aunt” persona detracts from Harris’s aggressive tactics in prosecution and imprisonment that defined her career in law enforcement.
I can’t imagine the decibel of laugh she’s holding in here:
Kamala’s foreword: “I’d like to dedicate this book to my mother.”
This would be funnier if we still had enough icebergs this size.
With Kamala potentially securing the Democratic presidential candidate nomination in a second attempt in the race, many hypothesize that she’ll have to lean on Ol’ Reliable (some White guy) in order to appear the most palatable.
And if you see the speed at which the gays get things done, are we looking at Pete Buttigieg? I mean — the wheels on the train also go round and round …
If the Harris campaign has already jumped on the meme wagon, it needs to go all in, like the user below suggests:
But at the end of the day, we must consider all possible outcomes of a Kamala Harris presidency:
It’s clear that we’re between a rock and a hard place here, and I’m not against people trying to have a little bit of fun with the situation as the gravity of it sets in, but all I can really say now is that 2024 has gone from pretty weird to utterly bizarre. I might have to swallow my pride, and my values, and simply stand aside unburdened by what has been if Harris successfully memes her way into the presidency.
