What’s Going Wrong for Joe Biden? I Found Out in the Saddest Way Possible.

I bought the Dark Brandon crop top as an experiment.

It didn’t exactly seem designed to fly off the shelves: It’s just a white T-shirt, emblazoned with a tri-color image of Joe Biden’s smiling face, his eyes glowing a menacing red, a requisite “2024” across the chest.

But the shirt belongs to a category of products that has captivated the Democratic imagination—or, at least, raised millions of dollars this year to support Biden’s reelection. This summer, the Biden campaign announced that items featuring the Dark Brandon meme accounted for more than half of the campaign’s merchandise revenue.

There are Dark Brandon yard signs, Dark Brandon stickers, Dark Brandon coozies, and Dark Brandon tote bags. The Dark Brandon color-changing coffee mugs reportedly raked in a cool $2 million in August and September alone. The rest of Biden’s inventory is comparatively boring: a few Pride-themed items, shirts that say “Union Strong,” a bunch of logo tees. If you want something a little more attention-grabbing, Dark Brandon is what you’ll get.

Don’t know who (or what) Dark Brandon is? You’re surely not alone. Not a single person clocked the meme on my crop top—which I wore, for journalism, out and about on the streets of the nation’s capital over several months, to see if I could get a sense of the zeitgeist driving Biden’s merch sales. But the mile I walked in the shoes (shirt) of a Dark Brandon fangirl still taught me something about the pitfalls of tying one’s branding to a meme—and how hard it will be for Biden to meet the standard of his alter ego in the election year ahead.

During the 2020 election, at the height of the pandemic and after years of Trump-induced panic, a soothing sense of predictability was Biden’s greatest selling point. One of his ads explicitly pledged that he would be a forgettable, fade-into-the-background commander in chief. “Remember when you didn’t have to think about the president every single day?” it mused.

The marketing was meant to make Biden appear basically unobjectionable to a wide swath of people across the political spectrum—a sign that he was the safest choice to unseat Trump. Biden’s unremarkableness became the centerpiece of his personal brand.

But it’s hard to sell a return to normalcy when normalcy has held the White House for the past three years. “More of the same” isn’t a promise that fires up the electorate. (Unfortunately, neither is “Finish the job”—which is Biden’s actual 2024 slogan.)

And, in fact, “more of the same” can be downright infuriating in the midst of a manic, outrageous, and sometimes deadly political climate. As president, Biden has often been slow—really slow—to respond to the biggest political upheavals of his presidency, most obviously and maddeningly so after the Supreme Court overturned Roe. His legislative accomplishments, while considerable, haven’t broken through to the American imagination. One of his biggest messaging wins of the year—joining the United Auto Workers picket line—has already been overshadowed and perhaps even undone by the anger that several key constituencies feel about Biden’s response to the Israel-Hamas war. His approval ratings have been underwater all year. A recent poll by the New York Times and Siena College has Biden trailing Trump in five of the six most important battleground states for the 2024 election.

So it makes sense that Biden’s campaign has been pushing Dark Brandon. With a set of laser eyes and an enemies list, Biden becomes an active character worth watching, lightly courting controversy with a bit of an edge. The animation hints at a quick temper and a sublimated thirst for vengeance. Is there a certain badass energy lurking beneath Biden’s folksy everyman persona and blundering physicality? Brandon says there is.

Dark Brandon is a turducken of a meme: There are many layers of meaning wrapped into this unholy symbol. It started two years ago, at the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama. An NBC Sports reporter was interviewing NASCAR driver Brandon Brown, who had just won a race, while noisy spectators shouted in the background.

In the video, the reporter, clearly a bit distracted by the commotion, says: “As you can hear the chants from the crowd—‘Let’s go, Brandon!’ ” In actuality, the audience was very audibly chanting “Fuck Joe Biden.”

The phrase “Let’s go Brandon” became a coded insult, a cheeky (and sinister) euphemism for an expletive-laden affront to the president. It remained a Republican taunt until it merged with yet another meme: a laser-eyed Biden behaving like an outlaw.

There are conflicting accounts of how we got the laser-eyed Biden meme. Some point to a piece of Chinese propaganda posted on Weibo soon after Biden was elected president. In the post, a series of images show an animated Biden with pupil-less glowing yellow eyes, sitting on a throne made of rifles and reigning over a horde of the undead.

More likely, the laser-eyed Biden was spawned out of the DarkMAGA meme universe. In viral images from 2022, Donald Trump often appears with glowing blue eyes, having bounced back from his 2020 defeat—or, in the minds of DarkMAGA enthusiasts, the theft of his rightful place as president—meaner and more ruthless than ever, bent on exacting revenge. The same aesthetic treatment was then applied to Biden.

Whatever the origin, the image of Dark Brandon—a gives-no-fucks, takes-no-prisoners Joe Biden—became co-opted and appropriated, first by liberals who found it funny and useful, and then by the president himself.

By the summer of 2022, White House staffers had begun repurposing the meme for their own ends, apparently at the urging of Anita Dunn, Biden’s top communications advisor. A version of Dark Brandon began appearing to trumpet the successes Biden achieved despite the best efforts of his opponents, who hated to see him win. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the falling gas prices and unemployment rate, the enactment of the first federal gun safety legislation in 30 years, the assassination of a top al-Qaida leader—in posts on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Dark Brandon took credit for all of it.

Earlier this year, Biden embodied the character in a riff at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Addressing the comedian Roy Wood Jr., who had the task of lightly roasting the president, Biden said, “I’ll be fine with your jokes.” Then he slipped on his aviator glasses and added: “But I’m not sure about Dark Brandon.”

Ever since the Biden campaign launched its Dark Brandon merchandise in April, Biden has gamely, if stiffly, promoted it in character, implying that his alter ego was ready to fly into a rage at the mildest slight. “I’ll ask you nicely to buy this new, color-changing campaign mug,” he captioned his video posted to Instagram, “But I know someone who won’t.”

And, voilà—a meme that originated in the dankest depths of the right-wing internet was reborn as mainstream marketing. Vox called Dark Brandon “a positive affirmation, not only of Biden himself, but of the internet’s ability to reclaim and salvage what once was lost.” By embracing Dark Brandon and foisting it upon an 80-year-old who reeks of uncool, Team Biden managed to capitalize on the meme while fully draining it of any subversive potential.

It was both a clever idea and, in meme terms, a very “How do you do, fellow kids?” move. You know an internet joke is dead when the president gets in on it.

But Dark Brandon did more for Joe Biden than lend him a semi-plausible air of internet literacy. It suggested, against all visual evidence, that he contains multitudes. “Dark Brandon represents a certain kind of vigor for President Biden that he does not have, or does not necessarily display in a compelling way to the public,” said Leslie Hahner, a professor of communication at Baylor University and author of the book Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-Right.

Compelling political candidates seem quick-witted and energetic, ready to spring into action at any moment. Biden appears unable to spring into anything, ever. Dark Brandon, by contrast, radiates wound-up energy, as if he will not rest until he gets his way.

Dark Brandon also expands the range of attitudes Biden can take without compromising his credibility. Right-wingers find it comparatively easy to meme and sloganize (Build the wall! Lock her up!) because they are not bound by expectations of propriety or moderation. “There’s no limitations in the ethics of what they will spread,” said Jennifer Grygiel, a professor at Syracuse University who specializes in social media. Right-wing memes “can engage with harmful rhetoric and ideology,” without turning off conservative voters, they noted.

The challenge for liberals, Grygiel said, is that the Democratic brand at its best is “still associated with benevolence.” That narrows the parameters of possible memes. Democrats have recently started to come around to the idea that mean-spirited retribution has a place in politics (Lock him up!), but they still feel bound to the virtues of human decency.

On the one hand, that means Dark Brandon could have backfired by appearing off-brand for the party or weakening its association with a quality cherished by many Democratic voters. But the meme also presents a workaround. He allows Biden to be petty and antagonistic—vengeful, even—and a little bit of a troll, for the benefit of the Democratic agenda. In August, the campaign bought several Dark Brandon­–­themed ads on FoxNews.com that ran the day of the first GOP presidential primary debate. (“Get real, Jack. I’m bringing Roe back,” read one. Another: “Tax cuts for yacht owners? Good luck with that, champ.”) It was a moment of fan service for Democrats, living out a fantasy of the perpetually triggered finally triggering the triggerers.

There is still a hollowness at the center of the meme, though, because it doesn’t refer to any actual qualities Biden possesses. Not only is Biden not “bringing Roe back”—he can barely bring himself to say the word “abortion.” More of that outlaw energy could do him good! His public would welcome a little more pizzazz. But that wasn’t the Biden promise. Democrats chose the snoozer candidate in 2020. The best branding move he has capitalized on is a joke about all the things he’s not.

The Dark Brandon shirt I bought presented a much higher barrier to acquisition than the average crop top. Because the cost of the garment counts as a campaign donation, you have to be at least 18 years old and a U.S. citizen or “lawfully admitted permanent resident” to buy it.

I asked my editor for permission—political journalists don’t, as a rule, contribute to political campaigns—and sent $32 to the Biden campaign, courtesy of Slate.

After it arrived in the mail, I started wearing the top on little errands: walks to the post office, the library, CVS. I don’t know what I was hoping for—maybe that, on the streets of Washington, D.C., where Joe Biden has worked for the past 50 years and lived for the better part of the past 15, someone would recognize the man’s face and give me a smile or scowl. The city is teeming with too-online politics nerds. Maybe one of them would spot the meme and have a little chuckle? Roll their eyes?

Despite my humiliation at wearing promotional swag in service of a sitting president, not a single person seemed to clock the thing. I’m sure I sorely overestimated how much people pay attention to the T-shirts of passing strangers. But also—is it possible that the Dark Brandon shirt is too niche to function as the campaign advertisement it was meant to be?

Even on the internet—the meme’s home turf!—there has been some confusion about the image. When Biden posted that Instagram video advertising the Dark Brandon coffee cup, comments flowed in from befuddled fans who didn’t get the reference. A user named @_cleavage_ came to their aid. “It’s just a joke and he’s trying to appeal to the younger generation,” the user wrote.

I was getting desperate. If no one would glance twice at my Dark Brandon shirt in D.C., I’d take it for a spin around one of Biden’s other favorite haunts: an Amtrak train.

On board the Northeast Regional, nearing the station at New Haven, a man who looked around my father’s age began staring at my shirt. “2024—who’s that?” he asked.

“Joe Biden,” I said.

“Ohhhhh,” he replied. He and his wife live in Delaware, he said, just about a mile from Biden’s house. (And even he didn’t recognize Biden’s face!) Unsure of the man’s political bent, I gave him a brief explanation of the meme. His wife looked over. “What was that meme called, again?” she asked. “Dark Brandon,” I said.

“Right,” she said. “The ‘Let’s go Brandon’ thing.”

“Well,” her husband said. “We agree with your shirt.”

With one year to go until the election, the president knows he needs to amp up his brand. Even if his approval ratings improve, he’s got to find a way to convince Americans not just that he has another four grueling years in him—but that they should get out and vote for him again, too.

His slogans have never quite hit. In 2020, he had “Battle for the soul of America,” which described the election, not the candidate. Now, he’s got “Finish the Job,” which sounds like a threat—is he going to land the final blow that kills America?—and minimizes the depth and complexity of the nation’s current predicament.

In 2008, Obama had his stylized “O” for an at-a-glance shorthand for his campaign, and the Shepard Fairey artwork that conveyed a certain historic grandeur. In 2016, people who loved Hillary Clinton could proclaim on their shirts that they were “with her.” And of course, Trump had the MAGA hat, the mother of all campaign swag. Dark Brandon is the only bit of branding that has stuck to Biden’s presidency, but it’s a deep-cut internet joke that’s already grown stale and isn’t immediately recognizable even to fans riding the Northeast Regional.

“Biden supporters, in general, are always looking for something that offers him a little bit more of an edge,” said Hahner. She should know: Her husband has bought a trove of Biden merchandise, including the Dark Brandon coffee mugs. (“This was not something that I was compelled to purchase,” Hahner was quick to clarify.)

There are other efforts underway to try to make Biden look cooler. A group called ProgressNow is spending $70 million to launch a new app for the sharing of liberal memes and videos to boost the image of the president and down-ballot Democrats.

But Biden’s problem remains. A good political candidate is like a good memer, Grygiel said: someone who can “effectively communicate and package something for dissemination, and spread, and replication.” Biden doesn’t quite fit the bill. Brandon does—but he’s not running for president.

One crisp afternoon in late September, I finally saw one in the wild: a Dark Brandon crop top, peeking out from under a blazer, on a woman who appeared to be in her late 20s. I chased her to her destination, a bikeshare station on a busy corner in downtown D.C. “Hi!” I said, eager to get some answers. “Do you have a second to talk to me about your shirt?”

“Sorry, I’m really late,” she said, probably suspecting that I was one of those clipboard people. Before I could protest, she biked away.

But the sighting helped clarify the phenomenon. In addition to being the least embarrassing way to support Joe Biden, the Dark Brandon merchandise provides a way to bridge the world of the internet, where much of today’s political discourse takes place, with the world outside. “The far right has a number of digital locales where they can gather and share memes. The left is in search of a digital common place,” Hahner said. “Facebook no longer offers that kind of common place. Twitter is dead.” All that’s left is our bodies.

By laying claim to Dark Brandon, the Biden campaign stripped it of its cool. By omitting Biden’s name from the crop top, the campaign made it ineffective as an advertisement.

But none of that is the point. The Dark Brandon merchandise isn’t about building support for a candidate, or even telegraphing any real meaning. It’s about sharing an inside joke. It’s the anti–MAGA hat—a communal marker of identity that affirms the political mainstream and normalcy, indicating one’s general levelheadedness. It’s an attempt at a laugh line during a dark, deeply unfunny election cycle. It’s offloading any responsibility for cogent policy messaging onto a fictional alter ego who represents everything the president is not.

It is also a physical, in-the-flesh signifier of investment in a campaign that Democrats, and the country, cannot afford to lose. It’s a reminder of all the very many normies out there—neither radical nor reactionary—who prize the stability Biden appears to provide. On the outside, they’re chuckling at a meme. On the inside, they’re clinging to their hope that the republic might continue to function past 2024.

In other words, the crop top may be a cringey contradiction: a sexy baby tee, featuring an image of a Roman Catholic grandfather. But it’s paying the salary of a Biden field organizer near you.