The Kamala Harris coconut tree meme, explained as best we can : NPR

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Advance teams set up the big moment Tuesday at the NAACP National Convention in Las Vegas, where Biden would show he could paint the contrast with Republicans and debut his 5 percent rent cap. The White House circulated a list of about 20 other elected leaders or union officials the president had spoken with on the plane or while traveling. About 75 members of Congress have reiterated their support for him.

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Biden is testing how far a president can lead when his followers go astray. The mantra of former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — “Diversity is our strength. But two days after that July 11 NATO news conference, the president found himself hunched in front of a stone fireplace in his Rehoboth Beach, Del., home, losing his temper. A war hero had just questioned the toll that age took on his ability to lead.

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A long interview with Complex magazine, another with BET, a third with Lester Holt of NBC News. He needed to get out more, to prove his mettle, to replace the images of the doddering debate night in everyone’s mind. History will record that as things got worse, Biden fought harder. Many Democrats described the first three weeks of July as a kind of nightmare — too extraordinary to be real, too unexpected to be believed. While Kennedy denies playing a spoiler role that would hand the election over to Trump, Kennedy has told reporters that he believes Mr. Biden’s odds of beating Trump in November are slim. “For me personally I just like really boring bed sex because I’ve done everything really wild and crazy,” he said.

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As the sitting vice president, she is a leading candidate to succeed Biden after his exit from the race, receiving his immediate endorsement. Other elected officials might step forward to challenge Harris, dividing Democrats and clouding the general election picture ahead of a November showdown with Donald Trump. Since then, the moment has been remixed into Charli XCX’s “Von Dutch” and Britney Spears’ «Gimme More.» Democratic operatives have spoken of being “coconut-pilled.” The meme flourished into 2028 debate fan fiction. Google searches for «coconut tree» started climbing in the U.S. in early July.

A Harris sequel would look nothing like the original, former advisers said. She’d be buoyed by a Democratic Party that would coalesce behind her, desperate to defeat Trump. Donors who’ve bailed on Biden might take a fresh look at the race with a younger candidate atop the ticket. When Harris gave that announcement speech before a hometown crowd five years ago, her prospects seemed dazzling.

The campaign has been comforted by internal data showing that most of the people Biden has lost since the debate are unlikely to vote for Trump, suggesting they may come back. But polling matters little when your party infrastructure is not behind you. Political polling and analytics deal in probabilities, not absolutes like “No way.” They create snapshots in time, out of focus.

• As Trump welcomed his new running mate this week in Milwaukee, video footage showed a delicate Biden struggling to get up the short stairs to Air Force One on his way to further isolation.
• The X-rated rompers were probed on the Australian TV series “You Can’t Ask That,” which went to air Down Under on Wednesday.
• Hers would need to be a virtually error-free sprint to Election Day.
• Political polling and analytics deal in probabilities, not absolutes like “No way.” They create snapshots in time, out of focus.
• A campaign is akin to an expensive startup business on a national scale.

Like all of us, the coconut tree moment exists in the context of all in which it lives and what came before it. Which is to say, it’s part of a larger set of memes surrounding Kamala Harris’ political persona. Harris has been spawning memes longer than she’s been vice president. But her laugh, her bus, her dance moves and her love of Venn diagrams have all become social media fodder. Then the 81-year-old president, traveling to campaign events to try to prove his vigor, contracted covid again.

Trump advisers and operatives in key states began discussing how they could help keep Biden in the race, believing he is a weaker candidate than other options for Democrats. “If Democrats want to win Georgia, they’d be better off with a potted plant at the top of their ticket,” said Cody Hall, a top adviser to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), describing the current environment there. «Lots of rumors going around about my meeting this morning with President Trump. Our main topic was national unity, and I hope to meet with Democratic leaders about that as well. No, I am not dropping out of the race,» Kennedy wrote. After meeting with Trump the morning of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Monday, Kennedy tried to dispel rumors on X suggesting that the pair met to discuss a unity ticket. In May, Kennedy told reporters during a presentation that he believed he had a path to victory if Mr. Biden dropped out of the race, leaving him in a head-to-head race against Mr. Trump. This time, instead of facing off against fellow Democrats, Harris would be able to elevate one to serve as her running mate.

In the weeks before President Biden announced he would not be seeking reelection, some Democrats online rallied behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the party’s new nominee. Now people worried to each other that the future of the world order could be at stake. White House senior staff let it be known that their doors were open to underlings if anyone needed to talk through the difficulties. “Keep the faith,” senior deputy White House press secretary Andrew Bates posted on social media Thursday. At times, it seemed the code of loyalty that had long followed Biden’s operations was coming undone. Some advisers shifted their focus from planning a second term to planning ways to lock in the policy wins they had achieved before Trump would take over, according to a Biden administration official briefed on the work.

And I think the coconut tree clip is a perfect example of that,” said Rebecca Jennings, a senior correspondent at Vox covering internet culture. «My mother … would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ » Harris said with a laugh. «You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.»