Joe Biden Is a Phoenix

The “Dark Brandon” meme understands the secret of Biden: The moment all looks darkest, he rises from the ashes.

Joe Biden wearing sunglasses
(Chip Somodevilla / Getty)

It all started in October 2021, at a NASCAR race at the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama. The crowd was chanting, “Fuck Joe Biden,” but reporter Kelli Stavast seemed to think the crowd was saying, “Let’s go Brandon” (a man named Brandon Brown had won his first career NASCAR event that day.) Extremely online right-wingers were delighted by this epic mistake and turned the phrase “Let’s go Brandon” into an anti-Biden meme. It appeared on everything from T-shirts to Christmas ornaments. Representative Lauren Boebert wore a hideous LET’S GO BRANDON dress to Mar-a-Lago. The subtext of the phrase is that Biden is so elderly that he’s not in on the joke that “Let’s go Brandon” is really “Fuck Joe Biden.”

Somewhere along the way, perhaps as a response to the GOP talking point that Biden is a weak president, some very online people on the left decided that Biden was actually a kind of centrist supervillain. This idea was bolstered when Biden’s COVID diagnosis coincided with the killing of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Online leftists started using a meme that shows Biden with glowing red eyes—a.k.a. “Dark Brandon.” (There are several theories about the origins of Dark Brandon images, some of which were created by the artist Yang Quan.) Soon, there were memes from Biden supporters pointing out that when Biden got COVID, a terrorist died, whereas when Trump got COVID, he could hardly breathe. Perhaps everything happening in Bidenworld was actually some grand plan, the memes suggested; perhaps Biden was (as Trump supporters used to say about Trump) playing four-dimensional chess. Eventually, even members of the Biden administration started tweeting pictures and referencing Dark Brandon—a progressive hero with the appearance of a supervillain.

It’s long been said that the left can’t meme.Trump was a terrible leader, but he was great at disseminating content. Remember when he tweeted out a video, posted by an anonymous Reddit account, of himself as a wrestler beating up CNN? It was the kind of video the mainstream media was disgusted by, but Trump’s base loved it. They felt like their leader was seeing them, appreciating them, and connecting with them on their shared media platforms—in this case, Twitter and Reddit.

Shared internet experiences are a real way for voters to relate to a candidate. Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman may be the only prominent Democrat who engages his base this way, using current memes and Snooki Cameos to taunt his political rival Dr. Oz.

The Dark Brandon meme is not likely to have much influence on popular opinion of Biden. Ryan Broderick notes in his newsletter, Garbage Day, that the meme seems to be circulating primarily in the corners of Twitter inhabited by Washington, D.C., politicos; it’s hard to tell if it will extend far beyond that. It’s also true that the meme isn’t enjoyed by everyone; Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote in The Atlantic yesterday that the meme is “cringe,” asking whether it might be “an undesirable conflation of politics and fandom … the kind of behavior for which liberals look down at Trump supporters.”

In my mind, what’s notable about the meme is that it depicts Biden as having agency rather than simply being shuffled around by members of his administration. The mainstream media has long painted him as a kind of rube, a victim of the presidency rather than an active participant in it.  As Susan Glasser noted in June, “Biden admitting his inability to fix intractable problems might be honest, but it’s also a political problem in and of itself for a President whose leadership has increasingly come into question.” The Dark Brandon meme manages to remind us that Biden is actually a leader with power.

Since Biden was elected, right-wing critics have desperately tried to portray him as Jimmy Carter 2.0. And Biden has been saddled with some of the same terrible late-1970s circumstances, many of which are beyond his control—for example, high gas prices. But after a spring and summer of being told that his presidency is dead, it was the moment when all looked darkest that Democrats passed the largest federal climate bill ever, the CHIPS bill, and the burn-pit legislation.

Earlier this year, negative media coverage (following Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal) helped get Biden to shockingly low approval ratings (as low as 36 percent). But the media loves an underdog, and it’s possible that some of the constant ragging on Biden contributed to his weird rise in popularity in some corners of the internet. Like Choco Tacos, people didn’t know how much they wanted him until he was at risk of being taken away.

Biden has been an underdog numerous times in his political life. Even in the 2020 presidential primaries, it looked like Biden might not eke out a win. But perhaps that’s the magic of Dark Brandon, king of hell, with his glowing eyes, on his throne of skeletons. Perhaps the secret of the Biden presidency is that the moment all looks darkest, the moment he’s left for dead, he rises like a phoenix from the ashes and does a pretty good job of getting stuff passed.

Molly Jong-Fast is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.