If you make a mistake in public, what’s the number one way to move past it? Laugh it off. From falling over on the pavement to showing the wrong slides in a Zoom meeting, the only way to relieve the tension is to make a joke out of it. ‘Woops, don’t walk and text kids!’ You’ll shout to the teenagers laughing at you almost falling flat on your face, or ‘that was just me testing you all to see if you were paying attention’ you’ll tell your colleagues on the Zoom call.
So when a politician makes a very public mistake, and can’t make a joke out of it themselves because it’s so serious that it would cause uproar, what’s the best possible outcome?
It becomes a meme.
And that’s just what’s happened with the New York Times report that Donald Trump allegedly only paid $750 in income tax in 2016.
Trump has denied this, calling it ‘fake news’ at a press conference.
But now, the trending story isn’t the report about how much tax the president paid, it’s about the memes people have created from the story. All over Twitter and Instagram people are memeing the news, using personal anecdotes to ridicule the report which media outlets are then covering – using funny pictures of Trump with windswept hair and a silly expression for extra lols of course.
Under the news tab on Twitter as I write this piece, the New York Times report is trending, and just two places down – threatening to overtake it as the clicks rack up – is the story of everyone sharing times they’ve paid more income tax than him.
In the UK we’ve done the same thing with our own politicians, Boris Johnson disarmed many with his ‘bumbling fool’ act, making people think he wasn’t really someone we needed to be worried about. The focus was on his unkempt hair, his uber-posh accent, his relationship with Carrie Symonds, and now he’s running the country in the midst of a global pandemic.
It’s tempting to make fun of a situation that is so unimaginably dire. People argue that the internet turned the murder of Breonna Taylor into a meme with posts along the lines of; ‘Now that my sideboob has gotten your attention, arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor’ and tricking people into thinking you were presenting a graphic about yoga poses but then inserting the text; ‘arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor.’
‘Absent of any specific call to actions, “Arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor” became a clarion call,’ activist Cate Young - who created the successful Birthday for Breonna website which featured a plan of action involving online and physical activism – wrote in a piece for Jezebel.
‘[The phrase is] divorced from Taylor’s life and image —the newest virtue signal of choice, one that defies the current conversation around the abolition of police and prisons,’ she continued.
These memes were well-meaning, people were angry and wanted justice, it was incredibly important for us to say her name over and over again, but as with Trump and Boris – albeit completely different stories - could it be that these memes take the sting and seriousness out of the story?
Memes are a coping mechanism, and this year we’ve needed them, so perhaps along with our memes we share a call to action; a petition, a news report from a reputable source, a link to a donation page, so that we don’t end up covering up the story with light hearted memes and doing politician’s PR for them.
And speaking of which;
If you’re in the UK register to vote and find out how to contact your local MP.
Details of how you can help get justice for Breonna Taylor.