The Boomer Meme President

From an opinion piece by Molly Roberts for The Washington Post:

There’s something known to those who grew up online as a “cursed boomer meme.” These memes are cursed because they are, basically, bad: occasionally indecipherable and almost never achieving the effect they intend. They’re boomer memes because they come from that crowd-of-a-certain-age that seems to have stumbled onto the Internet and now keeps bumping into things.

Many of these memes are variations on formats popular among millennials, but warped to the edges of recognition by some soon-to-be grandfather who has recently discovered the wonders of Photoshop […]

Some are originals, borrowing only the conventions of meme-making — macros with the white “Impact” font, say, or excessive collaging — to build something bafflingly new. Most of all, they’re deadly earnest, which is sort of the opposite of what memes are supposed to be.

It’s not that the president loves memes, though he does. It’s that he loves these cursed memes in particular. Because as much as Trump is the Nickelback president, or the post-truth president, or the reality TV president, or the 140-character president, he is, above all, the cursed boomer president.

Roberts makes a terrific point here. I think this will ultimately be one of the best ways to describe Donald Trump — the president who was woefully out of touch, not only with his constituents, but with the rapidly changing world he was surprised to find himself “leading.” In most of his actions, but especially in what he does online, Trump really is like an old person who just doesn’t quite get it.

The thing about many people who are around Donald Trump’s age (and a lot of early Gen Xers, too) is that they really don’t seem to understand the nuance of what’s happening in the world around them. Nevertheless, you can bet your balls that they intend to be just as loud and as adamant as they’ve ever been, if not more so, for the sake of exuding a false bravado to mask their perpetual confusion.