America Spent Years Turning Kamala Harris Into a Joke. In the End, She Might Get the Last Laugh.

Update, July 21, 2024, at 2:15 p.m.: Joe Biden has announced he has decided to end his run for president. In a letter to the nation, he thanked Kamala Harris for her partnership. In a subsequent tweet, he endorsed her:

The original article follows.

When the political satire Veep premiered on HBO in 2012, it was viewed by those of us outside of government as a show too absurd to be a true commentary on the vagaries of American political power. By the time the show ended in 2019, two and a half years after Donald Trump had been sworn in as the president, the audience had come around to some hard truths: Veep’s absurdism was starting to feel like a black mirror to reality. There are the vanity-obsessed lawmakers, the slobbering cronies, unethical lobbyists, and the now-predictable incompetence and selfishness that we recognize as holding us all hostage in a political system that feels far from representative. Central to all of that in Veep’s universe is Vice President Selina Meyer, an ineffectual, sharp-elbowed politician who’s routinely shunted to the side in President Hughes’ administration. In early seasons of the show, her sole political power is in being trotted out for photo ops with “the people” while rarely getting invitations to official briefings. Most of the show’s jokes stem from her barely repressed fury at being ignored by her own party; she struggles so much to get any face time with the president that the audience never sees his face either.

If that sounds uncomfortably familiar to non-Veep viewers, that’s because you’re probably already thinking about her real-life analogue: the veep herself, Kamala Harris.

On social media, you can find countless side-by-side comparisons of Harris’ real statements and Meyer’s scripted ones; both share a penchant for long-winded, nonsensical speeches, folksy interactions with the public that come off as clueless, and klutzy answers to even the simplest questions. But my favorite Harris-as-Meyer moment took place on Drew Barrymore’s daytime talk show in April. Harris, I presume, was on the show to give some canned answers about Biden’s second-term promises and the importance of voting. Instead, she was foisted into a disproportionately emotional chat with the former child star best known for giggling in the rain. Perched on a couch with alarmingly little personal space between the two of them, Barrymore leans into Harris, taking the vice president’s hands as she delivers this plea:

What … the hell is she talking about? Who knows, but it’s all I’ve been able to think about for the past few months. Momala. I repeat it to myself almost daily. Has any vice president been talked to so condescendingly, and with no real recourse available to her? Of course not: No one would ever ask Dick Cheney to take over the reins as Papa America and bring us comfort during the Iraq War. Even Joe Biden, back when he was the VP himself—in his aviators, eating an ice cream cone, politely edging away from a frenzied Leslie Knope on Parks & Recreation—was in on the joke, and still treated with some admiration. Harris, meanwhile, has the distinct expression of someone who’s just been spit on in public but is forced to grin and bear it.

This kind of bizarro-world moment is one of a hundred for Harris, who has spent much of her first term as vice president known less for her accomplishments than for being a living meme. There was Harris dancing with a marching band made up of children, Harris laughing maniacally with her whole body, Harris mimicking a senator’s voice while swearing him in. Most infamous is the clip of Harris talking about coconut trees, which has been taken out of context a thousand times—ironic for a message that was about existing “in the context of all in which you live and what came before you”—and remixed and memed in a surefire sign of this summer’s feeling of widespread insanity. There’s just something a little deranged and funny about Harris, the way her speeches contain these circuitous and repetitive slogans, or her attempts at relatability which get her mired in televised quagmires (Momala). It’s been a long time since the Democrats have had anyone who was ha-ha funny and not does-he-have-dementia funny.

But it’s not a coincidence that Harris, of all people, has had her vice-presidential term defined largely by being the butt of the joke. Since she joined Biden’s ticket in 2020, Harris has been sidelined by her party, defanged in quips made by pundits and in TikTok memes, and largely forgotten by voters in a fate befitting that of the first woman of color in her position. How funny, then, that, amid increasingly panicked concerns over Biden’s age and mental acuity, with those worries multiplied at least threefold following the assassination attempt on Trump, Harris is now being bandied about as one of democracy’s last hopes as the presidential election draws nearer like the promise of death itself. As the pressure on Biden to drop out of the race intensifies with each passing day, Democrats have worked themselves into a tizzy over who can possibly replace him. America (or half of it, at least) feels a little doomed, and the only person who might be able to save us is the very person we’ve been dutifully ignoring this whole time. Veep couldn’t have scripted it any better.

It may be surprising to recall that, before Harris became the neutered vice president, she had all the makings of a promising candidate. Or, at least, what we thought was a viable candidate in 2019. She had the right backstory: a biracial woman of color, a first-generation American raised by a scientist mother from India and an economist father from Jamaica, who came of age at Civil Rights protests at Berkeley in the 1960s. But, as Harris stepped onto the national stage early on in her presidential campaign, a dissonance emerged over who she was and what she stood for.

Harris’s political career began in the early ’90s when she was a deputy district attorney in California, and since those early beginnings, she’s oscillated between enforcing the status quo as a state prosecutor and attempting to inject some fairness in a deeply unfair system. In 2019, when she first started campaigning for president, Harris ran on what she described as a “progressive” record within policing. Trump’s campaign called her the “most liberal” member of the Senate, which progressives dutifully pointed out was actually not the case. After the summer of 2020, in a major shift from our decades-long status quo, there was real political momentum to hopefully enact change and hold cops accountable for abuses of power. Black and brown voters in particular were suspicious of a woman of color who was still operating in the very systems that unfairly persecuted her fellow community members. Before she even had a real shot at the presidency, Harris was caught in her own double bind: To progressives, she was a cop, and to conservatives, she’d never be enough of a cop.

When asked, on Watch What Happens Live in June 2020, about the movement to defund the police, Harris repeated an answer nearly verbatim to the one she gave Meghan McCain on The View a few days prior. “It really, I believe, is about reimagining public safety and how we achieve it,” she said. “Healthy communities are safe communities, and the way to create healthy communities is to invest in the core needs those communities have.” This is the safest, easiest answer she could give, a trap she falls into often. The shape of her word salad of a reply, although lacking in any real detail, sounds like something progressives would want—or at least what they wanted a few years ago during the height of the protests against police brutality. But this is impossible to square away with her actual record. A New York Times investigation in August 2020 showed that Harris was often reluctant to involve herself in cases around police shootings as California’s attorney general in 2011. She’s defended California’s death penalty in court despite saying she’s personally against it. In her 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold, she describes herself as a “progressive prosecutor,” whatever that might mean, but she also fought to keep nonviolent offenders incarcerated in California prisons as attorney general.

Throughout her campaign, there was a constant push and pull between the images that Harris tried to project: She simultaneously wanted to dispense with the myth that she was the most liberal option while also reassuring progressives that she was the liberal option they were looking for. The result was a muddled candidate, one who struggled to gain a real foothold despite good debate performances and a marketable personal narrative.

But in 2019 and 2020, Harris had real defenders and supporters in the #KHive. A play on Beyoncé’s Beyhive, KHive was the self-coined online term for Harris supporters, placed on the same shelf as Bernie Bros or (shudder) Cuomosexuals. There wasn’t a significant ideological underpinning to the KHive’s once rabid support; mostly, it seemed, they were drawn to Harris because she could have been our first woman-of-color president, and those very factors meant she had an even steeper uphill battle to the ballot box. The fact that Harris is a biracial Black woman made her a target of the right; even today, she’s still being insulted, demonized, and lied about by right-wing pundits and trolls. The KHive was self-deputized to defend her against such attacks (along with any mild critique). They formed enough of a base that as a running mate, she could offer the Biden ticket access to those coveted female, Black, and brown voters. The KHive was significant enough that Biden even made a video asking them for their support in 2020. (These days, according to new data from the Cut, support for Harris from Black women still far outpaces their support of Biden.)

Harris’ presence on Biden’s ticket helped swing Black voters—namely ones who still disapproved of Biden’s treatment of Anita Hill in the ’90s—to their side. But, once elected as vice president, Harris quickly receded from view, perhaps in an effort to downplay reports that Harris was mistreating staff members—how very Veep indeed!—or perhaps to mollify complaints coming from both ends of the political spectrum. Republicans hated her: She wanted to open the jails and make everyone gay! Progressives hated her, too: She built her career on holding up many of the very systems her more radical parents protested against in the ’60s. Between those anxieties and the rumors that, as a boss, she was cruel, or ineffectual, or disorganized, or egomaniacal, no wonder the White House chose to simply defang her instead.

Shut out of any meaningful positions of power within the administration, and without a weighty national issue to successfully champion, Harris has been dispatched to do the kind of low-stakes posturing that Selina Meyer was always so pissed off about. In 2021, Biden appointed Harris to handle migration issues at the southern border, a job that already felt a little fake, but felt even more ludicrous once Republicans dubbed the gig “border czar.” Classic: A flimsy, impossible task handed to Harris, warped into a job title for the scary biracial woman here to ruin America with Soviet-style socialism.

For the past few months, Harris has been spending much of her time engaged in the soft sciences of campaigning: Pride events where she’s wiggling around in a bedazzled denim jacket, reproductive rights events where she talks about what she and Biden will do after the election to bring back Roe v. Wade, outreach events with different ethnic groups in an attempt to bring Biden their (exhausted, indifferent) vote. We rarely heard from Harris when it comes to the economy, war, national debt, or climate change. Mostly, she’s been trotted out as token woman (when it comes to abortion or reproductive rights) or Black woman (Juneteenth) or Indian woman (Diwali only, steering clear of most discussion around India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party).

Where this leaves Harris is in the same gender trap that Hillary Clinton crawled into, times a factor of race. As New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister wrote in June, “Clinton was perhaps the most acute example of an assertive Democratic woman whose efforts to satisfy a ravening press and public intolerant of female complexity left her so twisted and poll-tested that she became largely illegible as human, let alone female.” Harris struggles with this, too; in all her attempts to appear approachable and relatable, she comes across as slightly off-kilter, like an OpenAI-generated image that’s too shiny and has too many extra fingers to be legitimate. No wonder we’re all laughing at her singing “The Wheels on the Bus”—she looks like she’s never heard a song before in her life.

The internet can’t resist such a strange spectacle, of course, especially as this election is shaping up to be our most dystopian thus far. Harris’ funny repeated aphorisms, her signature cackle, her mom-at-a-wedding dancing—all make her social-media catnip. Lately, the memes have increased tenfold as everyone has collectively lost their minds, leaning into the absurdity of our political reality—coconut trees and all. We’re stuck between a septuagenarian convicted felon and an octogenarian who accidentally referred to himself as “the first black woman to serve with a black president.” So yes, the coconut tree memes are all we have.

The grand twist of Harris being made into a joke is that her name is now being floated as our last true hope in this election cycle. Pundits and anonymous so-called senior political operatives alike are asking “Why not Kamala?” with a growing urgency. There have probably been more half-ironic conversions to the KHive in the past three weeks than in the past three years.

But memes do not necessarily a presidential successor make. The Biden administration wanted a more palatable, less visible Harris, one they could trot out at reproductive rights rallies, and not one that spooked people leery of biracial radicals or of hard-ass prosecutors. They got it: For better or for much, much, worse, they’re stuck with a version of Harris whose first-term record and public perception among left-leaning voters are more akin to that of a goofy auntie than of the second most powerful person in the country. Meanwhile, the right is still treating her like a radical who’s prone to destroying the economy and enforcing communism. Either too silly or too dangerous, Harris is caught between two poles of absurdity, just as she has been this entire time. It’s telling that, despite being vice president—the job that trains you for president—she’s still not the No. 1 pick among her own party members. Establishment Democrats and their donors aren’t scrambling to slot her in as Biden’s natural replacement; most of the support around her comes from a few media figures and weirdos on the internet intersplicing footage of her dancing to the tune of the new Charli XCX record. While big-time Democratic supporter George Clooney is writing op-eds for the New York Times about possible replacements, he’s not even listing Harris first on his own list of possible candidates. There’s nothing more Veep than that.

However, things have changed a lot since these Momala memes first started to take hold earlier this summer. Biden is weaker than ever, even worse than after his disastrous debate performance against Trump. With J.D. Vance now formally on the GOP ticket, a brutalist, even more unflinchingly anti-woman Republican Party is fully formed and still very likely to take the presidency this fall. Trump, having survived an assassination attempt, is more popular than ever, armed now with a shield of martyrdom and a direct line to Ronald Reagan and Jesus comparisons. It would take a lot to beat this team. Who knows if Harris can actually do it; whether she’s capable or not, she might be our last best hope.

Miraculously, Harris seems to be responding in turn. Finally, she’s stepping off the sidelines to directly address what kind of threat the Republican Party could pose in the near future. At a campaign stop in North Carolina earlier this week, she sounded more sure, more confident, and more presidential than ever. “If you claim to stand for unity, you need to do more than just use the word,” she said to raucous applause. “You cannot claim you stand for unity if you’re pushing an agenda that deprives whole groups of Americans of basic freedoms, opportunity, and dignity.” She spoke fiercely about Project 2025, about the plan to restrict abortion rights across the country, about the Trumpian attempts to overturn the last election. “We’re too busy watching what you’re doing to hear what you’re saying,” she says with a smile, but she’s not fucking around. She’s not falling out of a coconut tree. She’s mad as hell; it’s a good reminder of why so many people thought she had such a good chance in 2019.

Desperation-fueled memes were only ever going to take us so far in this cursed election. At the end of the day, what we need is someone who can step up to the plate, who can wrangle a disjointed party, and who can speak truth to the abject lies coming from Trump’s camp—what we need is an adult. When Barrymore pleads with Harris to be the country’s Momala, I can see the fear and longing in her eyes—she seems to really believe that Harris is the one person who can nurture this country back into some semblance of functionality, like only a mom can. Yet what I see in Harris’ expression is the soft, simmering irritation of a woman who does not want to have to mother anyone. What she wants—what she has clearly always wanted—is to be trusted with the job. But you know how it is with your own Momala, right? You only ever call her when you really, really, really need her to fix something.