The government has shut down for the first time in seven years. If you’re aware of this, you’re probably vaguely aware that it’s something to do with healthcare and immigrants. We’ll get to the precise reasons for this in a minute, but suffice it to say that they’re convoluted enough that the vast majority of Americans don’t understand them in the slightest, and don’t care to find out. This presents both parties with an opportunity. Public opinion is up for grabs.

So what have Republicans done?

They’ve pulled out their best weapons: memes, obviously.

Last week, as the shutdown loomed, President Trump took to Truth Social to share an AI-generated video depicting House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries dressed up like the Tapatío Mexican—big curly mustache, giant sombrero, you get the idea. In this fake video, the newly Hispanicized Jeffries stands next to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is explaining that Democrats want to shut down the government to give illegal aliens free healthcare in a ploy to win them over at the polls.

President Trump took to Truth Social to share an AI-generated video depicting House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries dressed like the Tapatío Mexican. (@WhiteHouse via X)

“We have no voters left because of our woke trans bullshit,” AI Schumer explains, as mariachi music plays in the background. “Not even black people want to vote for us anymore.”

Perhaps you think: Who cares? It’s a stupid online battle. But it matters, probably more than anything said on cable news or written in a newspaper. Three quarters of Americans have social media and over half of us get our news from it—this stuff goes a long way.

So how did Democrats respond?

Several, including Jeffries, decried the video as racist. Obviously, this did nothing. Democrats have been calling Trump racist for a decade to zero effect. The trolling continued, with the White House’s official Instagram account posting a picture of a crudely drawn sombrero. Another strategy was needed. If a meme war was what Republicans wanted to turn the shutdown into, Democrats decided, it’s a meme war they would get. It didn’t go well.

Consider the bizarre video posted by the official Democrats account on X, on October 1.

“Republican and Democrat kitties cannot agree on what should be funded,” says a generic AI voice over a video of two kittens standing in front of the Capitol building, seeking to explain the Democratic reasons for the shutdown in feline terms. “Democrat kitties want you to have healthcare. Republican kitties do not.”

“This is probably the best meme Democrats have done,” writes River Page. (@TheDemocrats via X)

The top comment, presumably from a disgruntled liberal user, reads: “DEMOCRAT KITTIES NEED TO DO MORE.”

Believe it or not, this is probably the best meme Democrats have done—it gets their message across (the shutdown is about healthcare), and at least it’s memorable (because of how weird it is). It’s also original, whereas most of the other memes they have deployed have been appropriated from the right.

Take, for example, Democratic senator Tina Smith’s use of the “green line” meme in an X dispute over the shutdown with Republican senator Mike Lee. Basically, the green line meme is meant to mock men who lean in when posing for pictures with women, the implication being that it’s a sign of weakness. In this case, Smith’s meme shows a photo of her standing straight while Lee is leaning in.

The green line meme is meant to mock men who lean in when posing for pictures with women, the implication being that it’s a sign of weakness. (@SenTinaSmith via X)

This doesn’t work for several reasons. The first is that nobody believes Smith, a 67-year-old liberal senator from the Midwest, actually understands what the green line meme means—I barely get it and I’m paid to write about this kind of thing. The second is that most of the people who would get it are right-wing internet addicts who’d never vote for Democrats anyway and find this frantic effort to reach out to be desperate and cringe. Meanwhile, actual liberals probably find her efforts to speak the language of the online right alienating.

“I cannot count how many times I’ve seen Democrat politicians resort to repurposing right-wing memes that they have no understanding of,” one self-described “postliberal reactionary” on X commented. “The left has zero originality of their own. As Stephen Miller said, you can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.”

The right has been saying since 2016 that “the left can’t meme.” And they haven’t gotten any better—and should probably give up at this point. Internet humor is mean in a million different ways, and entrenched political correctness on the left precludes the possibility of making fun of people in any way that might possibly be construed (or even misconstrued) as racist, classist, sexist, ableist, or anything else. The effect is a sort of self-censorship that results in a very shallow well of jokes on which Democrats are allowed to draw from.

Hence the Democrat-aligned Lincoln Project’s response to Vice President J.D. Vance’s comments defending Republican trolling over the shutdown: A fake video of J.D. Vance having sex with a couch. This is a stale reference to fake passages from J.D. Vance’s memoir that briefly circulated online last year.

The best thing Democrats can do is to stop desperately trying to be funny—it’s embarrassing, and perhaps more importantly, unnecessary. Democrats have a compelling case to make about the shutdown. Republicans are refusing to extend Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits that are set to expire this year. (They were introduced as a response to the pandemic and later extended.) That means millions who use ACA subsidies to buy insurance, including many working- and middle-class Americans who do not have insurance through an employer, could see the cost of their insurance premiums nearly double. Democrats want to extend the ACA subsidies. They also want the Trump administration to roll back cuts to Medicaid that will cause millions of poor and working-class Americans to lose their healthcare.

But by also insisting that Medicaid be extended to “lawful immigrants,” which includes some people who entered the country illegally but are awaiting asylum hearings, Democrats have given the GOP the ability to frame the entire shutdown as a debate over healthcare for illegals. This is a strategic mistake.

Still, you don’t have to agree with the Democrats’ argument to understand its appeal. Healthcare programs like the ACA and Medicaid are popular. Trump and Republican leaders understand this, which is why they’ve turned the focus to immigration. But the left could still win the war for public opinion by emphasizing that working-class Americans are in danger of losing their healthcare to fund tax breaks for the rich.

Democrats will never win a meme war, but they possibly could win the shutdown, if only they were willing to be a little bolder. They could run ads about kids dying of cancer to line the pockets of the obscenely wealthy, or make an AI video of Trump pulling the plug on a self-employed plumber in the hospital.

Politics isn’t nice, and Democrats have successfully fearmongered in the past. For example, in the 2012 election, a pro-Obama super PAC ran an ad depicting Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan pushing an old lady in a wheelchair off a cliff. “Is America beautiful without Medicare?” the ad asks.

Obama won that election, in part because his campaign was able to relentlessly depict Romney and company as callous, sociopathic oligarchs who wanted to take away people’s healthcare.

The Democrats should know by now that they are incapable of being funny—but also that they could stand to be a little more ruthless. And work a little harder to tell their story.

To quote one TikToker: “DEMOCRAT KITTIES NEED TO DO MORE.”