The Kamala Harris Meme Decoders Have Entered The Chat

Since the Vice-President’s elevation to likely Democratic presidential nominee, the internet has gone Kamala coconuts.

On yet another extremely normal day in Washington this week, a Gen Xer, a Boomer and a Millennial spent several minutes on live television trying to puzzle out the meaning of a meme.

“Kamala has branded her Kamala HP Twitter page with the same aesthetic of the album – that’s another Gen Z word, ‘aesthetic’,” said 55-year-old CNN anchor Jake Tapper. The album was Brat, the latest from singer Charli XCX, who, a day earlier, had tweeted “Kamala IS brat”, a form of publicity so valuable among a younger generation that it would be impossible to put a dollar figure on it.

But what did brat mean, the panel pondered.

“For those who … are not in the know, the way I am, that is a cool thing,” said panellist Jamie Gangel, born in 1955. “It has a colour. Chartreuse is the colour. And Kamala Harris has adopted that for whatever social media page that is,” she said, holding up a printout of the campaign’s X profile page, which bore a banner reading Kamala HQ. (It’s really more of a neon green, to be honest.)

“But I have brought some notes,” she continued, reading Charli XCX’s definition of brat: “‘You’re just that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes,’ end quote.”

“So is the idea that we’re all kind of brat, and Vice-President Harris is brat?” asked Tapper.

All of this had been explained to Tapper via text message from his 16-year-old daughter, Alice, a Charli XCX fan who has been playing the album on repeat this summer.

“I thought it was really funny and I do think my dad is perchance a bit brat; so I didn’t cringe,” Alice Tapper told The Washington Post on Tuesday, via email. “I’m used to the public embarrassment at this point.”

(Jake Tapper, for what it’s worth, does not agree that he is brat, nor does he fully understand the concept: “This just made me feel like I do when I see gossip magazines at the CVS about THE REAL REASON BOINGBOING AND KRU$H-POP CALLED IT QUITZ, as if I’ve been transferred to an alternate earth a la A Sound of Thunder,” he said via email.)

Meanwhile, just outside New York, podcaster Ian Crawford was spiralling deeper into a description of a cultural phenomenon that made perfect sense to him but continued to baffle his friends. Not all his friends, though. Just his straight friends. His not-terminally-online friends.

You see, there was the almost-immediate endorsement of Harris from Charli XCX on Sunday, and Charli has tons of queer fans, and so, that same day, a bunch of guys on Fire Island made T-shirts in the intentionally blurry “Brat” font. (“It’s supposed to be blurry. That’s just, like, the vibe,” Crawford says.) But that’s just part of it.

There’s also this thing with coconuts that comes from Harris’ 2023 quote about being a product of your society, which began with an adage from her mother – “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” – and which was taken out of context, even though the rest of the quote is actually about context, but now the KHive (that’s the name for a wide swath of harris’ supporters, which comes from Beyoncé fans, who call themselves the BeyHive) is using the coconut as a symbol of support, and inserting the line and the Vice-President’s ebullient laugh into other songs by queer icon pop stars, such as Chappell Roan (who requires her own lengthy explanation), and people are saying that they’ve been “coconut-pilled”, which is a subversion of the right-wing trope of being red-pilled, a reference to the Matrix franchise, and …

“I’m explaining a pop star to them. I’m explaining a green block to them, I’m explaining a blurry font. But all in terms of, like, the election,” Crawford says. “Explaining it, I feel crazy.”

There are Alices and Ians everywhere, suddenly tasked with the duty of helping their elders and peers understand why Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, posted a photo of himself climbing a coconut tree, or why there is a Kamala Harris remix of Kesha’s song Blow. They’re trying their best to define the terms “Veepmaxxed” or “brat-coded”. They are burdened by what has been. (Okay, we’ll meme-splain that one: Harris’ often-used refrain about being “unburdened by what has been” is yet another Kamala meme, which was initially used to attack her by Republicans before being reclaimed by the KHive.)

Serious publications like the Guardian, Time and, yes, this one fell all over themselves to translate the memes to older generations in lengthy explainers. “Harris’ election campaign … quickly embraced the support (whether ironic or not is still to be determined),” wrote USA Today, hedging in case it wasn’t getting the joke. “An ‘edit’ is a video compilation, usually made by a super-fan, that features images and videos of a celebrity,” the Independent noted dryly.

But in the way that explaining a joke always makes it instantly unfunny, they all failed to capture exactly what makes “brat” the zeitgeist. (Including this article. We know, we know!) Why is it internet gold to Photoshop the Vice-President’s face over Chappell Roan’s, or make a music video of her potential choices for a running mate to the Looking for a Man in Finance song?

Over at the newly christened Harris campaign, spokesperson Seth Schuster didn’t totally understand the brat thing that had started catching fire online, but it seemed like a big moment.

“For me, it was like, ‘Hey, I’m going to be that guy, but you have to explain this to me,’ which was honestly kind of part of the whole digital strategy,” says Schuster, 25. “It’s about reaching people in this fragmented media environment, reaching people in language that is organic.”

Crawford has had to describe it all to various friends several times this week. It doesn’t always help.

“I definitely had a friend who was also like, ‘Okay, but I don’t understand, like, why is that even a thing?’. And I feel like that’s the part that’s kind of harder to explain, right? Because it’s like – I don’t know, it just caught on, on the internet.”

“You just kind of have to get it. Brat is a mindset,” said Alice Tapper. “If you don’t get it, then you’re not brat.”

Explaining the Kamalanomenon (another Chappell Roan reference) is part of Jessica Maddox’s job. She’s an assistant professor at the University of Alabama and wrote a book, The Internet Is for Cats, about memes.

“I haven’t seen a meme generate kind of this much nonsense since Harambe in 2016,” she says. (That’s a meme about the gorilla that was shot and killed at the Cincinnati Zoo after it grabbed a child who fell into its enclosure, and then became a cult figure with a ribald slogan and … oh, forget it.) She spent Sunday evening telling her husband, “because I’m like, 10 days on the internet ahead of him”, about the significance of the coconut tree, which has been a thing for weeks now.

“What I’ve noticed over these past few days is that it’s becoming more of a rallying cry, kind of beyond just a meme,” Maddox says. Democrats “actually have hope for the first time in a long time and almost, like, don’t know what to do with it.” All the silliness “is becoming an outlet for that hope”.

There are, of course, places where brat needs no introduction and is highly In Context, if you will. Eddie Gutiérrez was in a group house on Fire Island, New York, with his friends for the weekend when, around 2pm, his partner delivered the news that President Joe Biden would be endorsing Harris. The group of 10 had already been trying to plan their “tea look” for social hour at a local bar; they had bought the highlighter-green crop tops and the iron-on letters but had no clue what they wanted them to spell.

“It instantly started snowballing between all of us. We’re all like, ‘Okay, should it be Harris? Should it be Kamala? Should it be coconut tree? Like, what should we put on these shirts exactly?’ But we knew we wanted to do something like that.”

They settled on Kamala. When they rolled up to the Blue Whale, cheers erupted. Another person took a video of them, which has now been seen 2.4 million times on TikTok.

“We want to live our lives. We want to follow our greatest excitement. To me, that is brat,” says Gutiérrez, a New York-based actor. “You know, all these news channels trying to figure out what it is – to me, that’s what brat is. And is Kamala brat? I think, for a lot of people, she is because she is our greatest excitement right now.”

And although older voters might roll their eyes, they should dismiss the Kamala memes at their peril.

“It’s bringing in this audience of people who are starting their first year as a voter for a huge election,” says Julia Terrell, 24, from outside Indianapolis, who earlier this week attempted to educate her Republican father about it all.

But as brat-girl summer cools into fall, what will become of the memes – and all the energy behind them? It depends on how well the Harris campaign walks an extremely fine line. Annie Wu Henry, a digital strategist who has worked on progressive causes, says it’s all about making it feel genuine, not forced. There’s a big difference, she says, between the campaign account joking about it and Harris herself acknowledging it. “She cannot break the 4th wall,” Henry wrote on X. “... We must learn from dark brandon, I beg.”

Some memes aren’t meant for everyone, anyway.

“I just think that, you know, the brat trend isn’t for Jake Tapper. And he doesn’t need to understand it,” Henry says. “My parents don’t need to understand the brat trend. And I think that if everyone was understanding the trend, it would take away some of what makes it special to the people who really are embracing it and enjoying it.”

Calling herself brat in a speech would be instant meme death for Harris. But there are other winking ways that she can continue to capitalise, says Allison, a 30-year-old teacher in the Bay Area who did not want to give her full name.

“If she does a TikTok of the apple dance” – viral choreography for the Charli XCX song Apple, whose lyrics have been compared to both Harris’ coconut quote and also Karl Marx and … here we go again – “I think that would be really funny,” Allison continued. “She should go on Hot Ones,” a show where celebrities answer questions while eating incredibly spicy wings. “She’d do amazing.”

The jury’s still out on whether the almost inevitable brat-themed merch – maybe green baseball caps that say “demo(b)rat”, as the Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association tweeted – will be brat or cringe. The brand-new merch from the Harris campaign doesn’t look so distinct from Biden’s.

But there is one extremely brat thing that Harris could do, says Terrell: “Win the election.”

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