Bernie Sanders – and his mittens – were everywhere on Inauguration Day. Just ask the Internet
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS, I-Vt. – and his mi ens – were here. They were there. They were everywhere.
The senator was a late invite to ‘The Last Supper’, crossed the Delaware River with George Washington and counselled Han Solo and Chewbacca on the Millennium Falcon.
That was before he had lunch with the ‘Mean Girls’ and served detention with ‘The Breakfast Club’.
Or maybe he was bowling with the Dude or recalling the story all about how his life got flipped and turned upside down when he became the prince of a town called Bel-Air.
As the instantly iconic photo went viral of Sanders looking cozy in a thick coat and mi ens at President Biden’s inauguration Wednesday, fans rushed to Photoshop the bundled-up senator in memes crossing historical, cultural and artistic moments.
With his arms and legs crossed as he sat alone and socially distanced on the steps of the Capitol, Sanders became one of the most memorable images of Biden’s inauguration, The Washington Post’s Travis M. Andrews wrote. When asked by Gayle King of CBS News about the viral reaction to his a ire, Sanders said he did what he could to stay warm.
“In Vermont, we know something about the cold. And we’re not so concerned about good fashion,” he told CBS.
“We want to keep warm. That’s what I did today.”
The image, which was taken by Brendan Smialowski of Agence France-Presse, keptSanders as the No. 1 trending topic on Twi er into early Thursday.
On a day in which a severely divided nation welcomed a new president who will inherit a pandemic and a teetering economy, popping a cutout of Sanders into ridiculous photos provided a rare laugh nearly everyone could agree on.
History buffs had no trouble finding critical moments in world history for the parka-wearing Vermonter to visit.
At the Ge ysburg Address, Sanders appeared on the stage, listening intently to what President Abraham Lincoln had to say.
What if he were to toss in his two cents at the 1945 meeting in
Yalta with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin?
Turns out, it looked pre y natural. The same couldn’t be said of him si ing in the ring as Muhammad Ali knocked out Sonny Liston in 1965. Or when Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969.
The art world envisioned how some of the most timeless paintings and photographs would look like if they included a 79-year-old senator si ing in wintry Washington weather.
In one person’s imagining of ‘Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States’, Sanders could not be bothered to pay a ention to what Washington was saying to the delegates at the Constitutional Convention inside Independence Hall.
A erward, he found himself craving a late-night bite and some coffee, gazing out at the dark night from the downtown diner in the 1942 painting ‘Nighthawks’. For ‘Lunch atop a Skyscraper’, the masked Brooklyn native would have had a hard time eating lunch on a girder with his fellow ironworkers, a black-and-white image shot 840 feet in the air.
Perhaps the most popular Sanders memes, however, involved people guessing what the new chairman of the Senate Budget Commi ee would look like in their favorites movies and TV shows.
Instead of guests being terrorized by the Grady twins in ‘The Shining’, there were now two identical senators haunting the end of the hallway.
Sanders was catching up with Carrie Bradshaw and the gang in one moment and reuniting with Jon Snow and House Stark in the next.
When he wasn’t si ing on the big, red chair from ‘Blue’s Clues’ or trying his best not to talk to Forrest Gump, one Twi er account thought about the socially-distant Sanders as the fi h member of ‘The Golden Girls’.