The man behind Biden-Trump memes
WASHINGTON (AP): T WAS two days after election day when Josh Billinson decided to turn heartbreak into humour. The Washington, DC-area Hillary Clinton supporter decided to start churning out tweets matching photos of President Obama and VicePresident Biden with fake captions that show Biden planning to prank the incoming Trump administration.
Soon, one tweet in particular went viral with many more to follow.
In the posting, Biden is seated in the Oval Office looking over at Obama, who has his hands over his face.
And Biden is acting like a kid who doesn’t want to meet his stepfather for the first time.
Obama: “Did you replace all the toiletries with travel-size bottles?”
Biden: “He’s got tiny hands, Barack. I want him to feel welcome here.”
On Billinson’s Twitter account alone, the tweet has been seen by more than 3.3 million people and retweeted more than 35,000 times.
“It’s completely blown me away to see the reaction from this,” said Billinson, a 22-year-old preschool teacher in Burke, Virginia, who spends time in Delaware at his parents’ Fenwick Island home.
“Personally, I’m not happy with the results of the election and I think the natural reaction from myself and others in my generation is to voice that frustration publicly,” he adds, “and Twitter seemed to be the natural platform for that.”
His Twitter account, @jbillinson, had 300 followers before election day. Now, he has more than 14,000. Three days after the election, Billinson had to turn off notifications
Ion his phone – they were coming in so fast that the Twitter app was nearly unusable. And in the past week, he has been interviewed by CNN, ABC and the New York Daily News with his tweets featured everywhere from the BBC and NPR to Yahoo and satirical news site The Onion.
Billinson’s tweets, which find Biden involved in harmless Home Alone-esque antics, share the same Internet space as a wave of fellow armchair comedians who have since been posting their own Biden prank posts. (Biden memes are nothing new, but pranking Trump give them a fresh, popular wrinkle).
It has caught on so much that if you’ve been on the Internet or social media at all in the week following Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton, you’ve likely seen one or more of the postings.
In the meantime, Billinson is fielding offers that have come in during his 15 minutes of fame, including proposals from a literary agent. But for Billinson, he would rather hear from the Office of the Vice-President of the United States to get a stamp of approval from the big guy himself.
“While my tweets might seem to be poking fun at him, that was never my intent,” he said. “I’ve looked up to him for years and would love nothing more than to meet him.”
And if he ever does, he won’t certainly fall for the ol’ salt trick.