David’s view
We don’t know how the government shutdown will end. We do know what its defining image in Washington will be: A computer-generated sombrero, plopped onto the heads of prominent Democrats, accompanied by an equally cartoonish Pancho Villa mustache.
The sombrero meme started with pro-Trump social media accounts and quickly jumped to the president himself, who shared an AI-generated video of Democratic leaders with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wearing the stereotypical costume.
Reporters in the Brady Room earlier this week were greeted by the meme on a loop; the vice president, addressing them on the shutdown, laughed at Democrats who were offended by the trope.
“Hakeem Jeffries said it was racist,” said JD Vance. “I honestly don’t even know what that means. Like, is he a Mexican-American that is offended by having a sombrero meme?”
No joke gets funnier through explanation, but this one seemed to get funnier to Republicans the more seriously that Democrats took it. Which might explain why Jeffries quickly pivoted to meme-ing Vance right back with a Garbage Pail Kids-coded version of his face.
The lesson of this meme war is already clear: While MAGA’s political victory last year was narrower than Ronald Reagan’s or Richard Nixon’s, its cultural victory was complete. Trump’s first campaign actually got into trouble with retweets, and his second was defeated during what now looks like left-wing culture’s apogee.
His third campaign found both mainstream media and cultural taste-makers at historic weak points. People taking offense at jokes simply didn’t land as a news story anymore. Democrats hoped that Tony Hinchcliffe’s roast comedy at the Trump campaign’s largest rally — specifically, his joke that Puerto Rico was a trash island — would peel off Puerto Rican votes.
A week later, Trump notched a 20-year-record high performance for the GOP with non-white voters.
Republicans responded by leaning into their ideal image as the masculine party, with appeal that cut across racial barriers. They saw the left with a finger-wagging schoolmarm problem compounded by tut-tutting over bad words.
“What is the essence of masculinity?” Vance mused at CPAC this year. “When I think about me and my guy friends, we really like to tell jokes to one another.”
Vance has lived that philosophy, laughing at Democratic memes that contort him into a smooth goblin or a jheri-curled incel. Conservatives even made more, getting themselves in on the joke.
And while some conservatives have complained about this season of “South Park” portraying an under-endowed president in bed, literally, with Satan, most have celebrated their own ability to take a joke. Before his assassination, Charlie Kirk changed his TikTok profile into an image of South Park’s Cartman making fun of him. It’s still there.
Contrast that with the enduring queasiness that many Democrats feel about Gov. Gavin Newsom’s team, which has spent months making MAGA-style joke posts. Behind the scenes, that has come from a team thinking deeply about what works for Republicans online; but the rest of the party can’t quite go along yet. They’re the party of artists, not AI-generated fakes; “meme magic” seems subliterate to them.
This is a puzzle for Democrats, who’ve been losing younger male voters and wonder if they are constitutionally able to regroup. Rob Flaherty, a former Biden and Harris strategist who has warned that the party is losing culture wars, told me that Democrats’ impulse to protect institutions made them much less interested in offensive jokes about their opponents.
“If you’re predisposed to be cautious and also don’t want to hasten the degradation of norms, you’re going to always approach these things with a hitch in your swing,” Flaherty said. “I don’t necessarily think what Trump is doing is helping him. But I think the inclination to take offense versus fight back is sort of a tool from a toolbox of an ancient era.”
The sombrero joke already feels old. Downplaying it and blowing it off? That would be new.
Notable
- In a speech at the National Conservatism Conference, Helen Andrews criticized the “feminization of culture,” which had become a problem for the movement’s ideas but a weakness that Republicans could run against.
- In The Bulwark, Bill Kristol condemned Trump’s “AI brain rot” and urged Americans to reject it. “Just because he’s acted this way before doesn’t mean we should let it go unremarked upon.”