The Biden Campaign Just Can’t Stop Meme-ing

Since October, almost every week—and sometimes several times a day—someone from the Biden presidential-campaign team has opened their laptop and navigated to TruthSocial.com, the right-wing Twitter clone owned by Donald Trump. They’ve clicked the website’s “Compose” button, typed something up, and hit the website’s special “Truth” button to publish the post from the campaign’s official account, Biden-Harris HQ.

Truth Social is known as the platform where Trump and the rest of MAGA world go to post. It is where the former president first posted after surviving the assassination attempt on Saturday, and where he announced that J. D. Vance would be his running mate. That Joe Biden has an active account is akin to a satanic metal band playing at a Christian-rock festival. Most of the posts are either about how Trump is faltering, or about how Biden is succeeding at things that Trump has claimed are his own strengths. Last month, the account posted side-by-side photos of a packed Biden rally and a comparatively less packed Trump one: “President Biden vs. @realDonaldTrump speaking at the same venue in Philly ????.”

The Biden-Harris HQ account is the logical conclusion of an ethos that “any engagement is good engagement.” The account follows a single person, Trump, and has more than 200,000 followers—an impressive amount within enemy territory, but one that is paltry compared with Trump’s 7 million or even Don Jr.’s 3.7 million. With those numbers, Biden probably isn’t doing anything meaningful in an electoral sense, especially if almost all of those followers already hate him. But in a sense, something special is going on—a little political meme magic, even, as Biden’s campaign nears implosion.

On several occasions, Biden’s Truth Social account has bragged about the stock market hitting new highs under the president, which is a riff on how Trump constantly referenced the stock-market records during his presidency. Other posts include a montage of Trump supposedly “getting confused, lost, wandering off, and waving to nobody” (posted a few days after Biden appeared confused and lost during a G7 event), and Trump getting “booed” at a Libertarian Party event. The Biden campaign is not exactly known for its social-media acuity. Its posting strategy on the biggest platforms has sometimes veered toward the bland and cringey.  Since the debate, his campaign has posted several clips of Biden on TikTok with the caption “Dark Brandon calls out the media for ignoring Trump’s lies.” But the Truth Social posts stand out in that they are actually pretty good. Dunking on your rival is always a solid move. Nailing your rival’s signature dunk in their home arena is even better.

Every post receives a deluge of negative comments. Truth Social users don’t just view Biden’s account as a chance to skewer a politician they hate regarding the issue he’s posting about. They air out whatever rage they feel toward anything even vaguely progressive. One user posted an image of an LGBTQ Pride flag superimposed with the text “June is groomer pride month” in response to a Biden post about the Dow reaching a new all-time high. In most of the more than 900 other replies to the Dow post, people aired similar anti-liberal perspectives. “I fucking hate Democrats … And I celebrate when they die,” reads one response to a Biden post about a Fox News clip in which the anchor says Republicans “look incompetent.”

Naturally, I wanted to find out who was doing the poster’s version of the fight scene in Cool Hand Luke where Paul Newman gets punched over and over but keeps getting back up for more. After trading emails with the Biden campaign, I found out that their martyr of malarkey was not a single person, but a team of people led by Rob Flaherty, Biden’s deputy campaign manager.

Flaherty explained to me that, initially, the campaign joined Truth Social in an attempt to influence Trump’s vice-presidential pick—hoping to goad him into picking a more extreme candidate than Nikki Haley, who ran as a more moderate alternative to Trump in the Republican primary. She was once rumored to be a potential VP pick, though Trump squashed those rumors in a Truth Social post in May. “We lifted up any attack line Nikki Haley had on Trump so that his base would turn on her,” Flaherty told me. (In one day in March, the account sent five consecutive posts calling out critiques of Trump from Haley and her supporters.)

Democrats did a version of this in the midterm elections, amplifying far-right candidates in Republican primaries, whom they saw as more beatable than moderate ones. But this strategy of “accelerationism”—supporting an intensification of things you’re opposed to, with the aim of showing how bad they are and get people to your side—can easily backfire.

Flaherty told me this last Friday—before the Republican National Convention began, but at which point Biden was losing support in his party and trailing Trump in the polls. With Vance as Trump’s running mate, the Biden team appears to have gotten what it wanted: a candidate who has boosted a sanitized version of the white-supremacist “Great Replacement” theory and who said in 2022 that he “would like abortion to be illegal nationally.” (The Biden campaign declined to comment further when I followed up with them yesterday.)

The Biden campaign has also turned to Truth Social with more juvenile aims: trolling Trump as much as possible. It lets staff directly counter messages that Trump sends to his base, and it makes for good posting. “It just sort of seemed like a funny thing to do,” Flaherty told me over the phone. “To show up on his home court and troll him.”

It’s an attempt to walk into MAGA territory, flex on your haters, and talk smack. That well-tested approach—which Trump himself has frequently engaged in on social media—is one of the few tactics that almost makes sense in an otherwise confounding and splintered election-media landscape. Every candidate has Facebook, YouTube, and now TikTok accounts because they know they’re supposed to, but no one really knows what they’re supposed to do on them. Trump knew how to leverage Twitter before he was booted from it in 2021, but he lost a step on Truth Social. His posts there are not as pithy and don’t run news cycles and move markets the way his tweets did (vice-presidential announcements notwithstanding). Aside from Dark Brandon, Biden’s meme alter ego, the president never seems to have had a firm footing on any platform.

New York’s John Herrman predicted last year that 2024 would be the “Nowhere Election,” and he seems to have been right. Amid a swirling mess of social-media platforms, video-streaming sites, podcasts, and legacy media outlets, no medium has a clear edge over the others like Facebook and Twitter had in 2008 and 2012, respectively, and that TV did before that. The consequence of this for candidates, Herrman writes, is that “without a clear sense of where audiences are gathered or whom they trust, it’s hard to know how to allocate resources or how to reach people.”

The Biden campaign is also aware of this. Flaherty noted that voters’ attention is diffuse and requires a more diffuse posting strategy than in previous election cycles. “There are no broadcasts anymore. You’re going on a YouTuber’s stream to talk to his audience. You’re going to Truth Social to talk to a far-right MAGA audience.” Whatever resources the Biden team is allocating to its meager 200,000 Truth Social followers isn’t going to turn things around. But the campaign’s Truth Social account has become the place where Biden comes across as confident and combative—as the kind of candidate capable of out-dueling Trump.

After a brief hiatus following the assassination attempt on Trump, the Biden campaign took to Truth Social to respond to the Vance announcement. The account reminded users that the senator from Ohio had called Trump a “cynical asshole.” Right away, MAGA reply guys swooped in to roast Biden back.