Trump Versus the Coconut-Pilled (2024)

In the days after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, while searching for a touch of levity, I began joking online that the president should go on Hot Ones, a very popular YouTube interview show where celebrities answer questions while eating spicier and spicier chicken wings. Although it was a joke at first, I quickly became fixated on the idea. Hot Ones turned into a shorthand for the Biden campaign’s attentional vulnerability: If the president was too infirm, or his staff couldn’t trust him, to eat wings on a popular web show aimed at a young online audience, then that seemed like good evidence that he was a campaigning liability.

Hot Ones has become the cornerstone of what I’ve been thinking of as the Joe Biden Theory of Attention. It doesn’t matter what Biden says: After the debate, his brittle demeanor and bizarre slipups became a black hole, swallowing any and all substance. Every bit of attention was locked on his least flattering qualities. In each public appearance, Biden unwittingly created an attack ad for the Trump campaign—which, as my colleague Tim Alberta has reported, was tailored to run against Biden’s age. Online, Biden was a self-defeating candidate—able to attract a critical mass of attention, but only in the worst way.

Vice President Kamala Harris, whom Biden endorsed for the presidency as he stepped aside from campaigning for reelection earlier today, has no such problem. She has always had a digital fandom. During her 2020 primary campaign, her online fans, known as the #KHive, gained a reputation both for their ability to drum up enthusiasm for the candidate across different platforms and for being overly aggressive, sometimes harassing other posters. But whatever—the important thing is that these people exist and they’re invigorated. The Harris Theory of Attention is much different from her former running mate’s in that she seems eminently meme-able, not only because of her formidable public-speaking skills but also because her public performances can occasionally veer into awkwardness. Harris is prone to gaffes as well: In 2021, a flubbed answer about visiting the border led to her receding from the public eye during the early days of the Biden administration.

Supporters have compared her to Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s character from Veep, in that she sometimes appears to exude a just barely sublimated ambition to be president. But this energy isn’t a liability on today’s internet; it’s an asset. Around the July 4 holiday, as speculation increased that Biden could drop out of the race, progressives started entertaining a Harris candidacy with an ironic zeal that transformed into something genuine. On TikTok and X, people began posting videos of goofy or awkward moments from past Harris speeches—videos of her singing “Wheels on the Bus” or uttering “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree,” followed by a peculiar, tense string of laughter. (That second one has been viewed 14 million times on X alone.) This being the internet, the videos were immediately remixed into other memes, each iteration getting more absurd. In one, those previous two clips are set to the Joker’s theme from The Dark Knight; in another, Harris’s campaign exploits are remixed in a frenetic supercut set to music from Charlie XCX’s popular album Brat. Being “coconut-pilled” became a winking shorthand for people who were coming around to the idea of Harris as a commanding nominee. As The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz wrote recently, a lot of the ironic Harris support was coming from leftists who’d previously supported Bernie Sanders’s campaign. Just as important, the enthusiasm around the ridiculous Harris memes gave the impression of an odd but genuine bit of grassroots support for a viable Trump challenger—something that younger supporters may have felt was lacking in Biden’s online campaign.

It’s hard to discount all of this attention in the era of meme stocks, when small groups of devoted, extremely online supporters have been able to band together and exert outsize influence on everything from the stock market to Hollywood. “Ironic khive posting is unironically the most energized the twitter Dem electorate has been in about a year and I think there’s probably something optimistic in that,” Kelly Weil, a journalist who writes frequently about the internet, posted on X earlier this month, during the surge of Harris memes.

Harris’s quirks are well matched for an online discourse that revels in weirdness and chaos. A little bit of strangeness—especially if it seems harmless—is an excellent way for a candidate to attract attention online. Remixed speeches, no matter how unhinged, are still an example of what a political consultant might call “earned media.” Each meme, however odd, is an ephemeral and free political ad. People might be poking fun or gawking, but they’re still listening to the message (the coconut-tree anecdote, for example, is part of a story Harris told about the importance of context and resisting a narrow view of history).

Weird memes can’t win an election on their own, obviously. But just as the Biden Hot Ones test spoke to a larger vulnerability for Biden, the semi-ironic “coconut-pilling” of leftists on X and TikTok reveals a larger opportunity for Democrats with Biden out of the race. Not only has the Trump campaign lost its most salient line of attack (that Biden is old and unfit for office), but it’s now forced to compete for attention against a candidate who, should she become the nominee, can easily attract it in droves. Harris may not be extremely online herself—she lacks the genuine social-media prowess of somebody like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—but her age and vibrancy are still advantages online. Whereas the Biden campaign’s Dark Brandon memes felt forced, Harris’s efforts are likely to appear more authentic, maybe even fun. Trump would certainly lose the ability to portray his opponent as weak and elderly if Harris were to get the nomination. In the June debate, Trump said he could trounce Biden in a golf match. How would that same line work on Harris? Probably quite poorly, conjuring images of Trump doddering around on a golf course.

Presidential elections ought to be about substance over style. The particulars of attention ought to be secondary to a candidate’s record. The major frustration among Biden supporters was that the pressure for him to step down was unfair, given the success of his presidency and his lifetime of service. It’s an understandable argument. But presidential campaigns—especially ones that will be decided on the thinnest of margins—are attention contests. They are big, dumb spectacles that, at their core, are about the most consequential of issues, but are also sometimes influenced by incredibly superficial concerns from an electorate that doesn’t always vote rationally.

The past few weeks have been both an argument over and an education in the importance of style and image in the eyes of voters, the press, and lawmakers. Biden’s attentional liabilities didn’t just hurt his candidacy; they strengthened Trump’s. In the past eight days, Trump dodged a bullet, was memorialized with a historic image of triumphalism and strength, and spent a week monopolizing the airwaves at a convention where Hulk Hogan ripped his shirt off and declared his support for the Republican candidate in front of millions of viewers. The Trump campaign will certainly find ways to seize on Harris’s gaffes, should she become the nominee, and its candidate remains the front-runner. But now Trump is going to find himself forced to do two things he loathes and isn’t very good at: sharing the stage and competing for attention.