Joe Biden Made a “Dark Brandon” Joke at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, Killing the Meme for Good

Now it’s his.

Joe Biden as 'Dark Brandon' during the White House Correspondents' Association on April 29.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

President Joe Biden, for those fortunate enough to have missed it, made a “Dark Brandon” joke Saturday night at the White House Correspondent’s dinner. This was no surprise. Biden’s reelection campaign already references this meme through a picture of the president with laser eyeballs. But the 80-year old president’s reference completes a process through which Biden’s team ruined what was once an ironic meme of the Right by making it lame, earnest, and left-leaning.

My colleague Ali Breland wrote a “requiem for a Dark Brandon,” last August, declaring that Biden had killed the meme by adopting it. He explained the backstory this way:

If you’re not terminally online, Dark Brandon is a riff on Dark MAGA, a short-lived meme about Trump. Dark MAGA’s few proponents said that Trump would return (probably in 2024) with the gloves off, ready to punish his enemies. To demonstrate this new more authoritarian Trump, a few supporters photoshopped Trump and created art that looked “fashwave.” (It was lame and Dark MAGA, as I wrote before, barely existed.)

From there, Dark Brandon emerged as a joke on top of a joke. It was a play on “Let’s Go Brandon,” the Trump rallying cry spawned from a NASCAR reporter either trying to sidestep or genuinely mishearing the crowd around her yelling “Fuck Joe Biden.” The idea of Biden—a tired, extremely gaffe-prone older man—rounding up his political enemies for public executions is funny. Dark Brandon was able to be more successful than its predecessor because it had the key meme ingredient: irony.

After Biden won passage of his climate and spending bill, Democrats began posting Dark Brandon memes to assert that instead of “bumbling Biden, he was actually Dark Brandon: the competent leader playing 3D chess to pass the IRA,” Breland wrote. “The meme went from being a joke about him being so hapless that he could never possibly look in control to him actually looking in control as his signature legislation passed.”

This is all super lame, grandpa-stealing-the-kids’-jokes stuff, but that’s sort of the point. As Breland noted: “Earnest Democrats like Biden might have a hard time being cool on the internet,” but they can stop right wing jokes from being the least bit edgy. Biden’s joke was sure cringe-worthy. But it was a stake in the right’s Dark Brandon meme. Now Joe Biden owns it. Which is almost cool.

WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate