Just two days into Vice President Kamala Harris' run for the presidency and "coconut tree" memes have consumed the internet.
“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” Harris says, laughing before she turns dead serious. “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
The line is from Harris' speech at a White House event for Hispanic leaders in May 2023. In fact, the Republican National Committee's GOP War Room YouTube account may have been the first to isolate that moment from her speech, posting a clip of it that very same day in an apparent attempt to paint her in a negative light.
The clip gained renewed attention over the past few months, and it had become a viral meme long before President Joe Biden’s debate performance or any sincere talk about his withdrawing from the race had begun.
But the meme gained real momentum in the wake of the debate as the Democratic Party started to reckon with Biden's age and fitness for office. For younger people especially, the cynicism they reported around Biden's candidacy was suddenly replaced with a hope that someone else might take over the top of the ticket. Harris' emergence as a leading contender supercharged the meme, and thus you had people online earnestly admitting to being "coconut-pilled."
I’ve previously questioned the Biden campaign’s attempt to engineer memes to appeal to voters. Harris is different from many politicians in that she seems innately meme-able — a nebulous quality that her presidential campaign is already capitalizing on. Part of why the coconut tree meme works is because it developed organically on the internet and coincided with Harris’ abrupt and historic rise to the current top of the Democratic presidential ticket.
But its stratospheric ascent in recent weeks also comes with a risk of oversaturation, especially as other politicians try to get in on the joke. After Harris announced Sunday that she intended "to earn" and "to win" the nomination, some Democrats who rushed to endorse her referenced coconut trees in some way. Harris herself has not acknowledged the meme or tried to make a funny reference to it — a move that would almost certainly curdle its charm quickly.