The clearest precedent for “Thank you, Brandon” began in 2009 with “Thanks, Obama,” the catchphrase uttered most often by Tea Party personalities and boys I went to high school with. That phrase originated on Twitter in its earliest days of political relevance, and was affixed to snide tweets about Barack Obama’s failures, both real and fabricated. By 2012, liberals had flipped around its meaning, such that “Thanks, Obama,” when attached to some trivial or mundane grievance, could be repurposed as a satire of conservative petulance. But “Thanks, Obama” would eventually become bipartisan, used online as an absurd, sarcastic rejoinder to pretty much anything. By 2015, “Thanks, Obama” had grown so old and toothless that Obama himself could riff on it in a BuzzFeed video—and it didn’t even make him seem like an oversensitive loser. (Though it is pretty corny to watch now. It’s very of its time.)

Already, of course, #ThankYouBrandon is being co-opted by sarcastic Republicans as a sequel to “Thanks, Obama.” (Walked right into that one!) If Democrats relaxed a little bit, they could turn this around. They could just do what they did last time—repeat the words of the original meme until they become mush. But if I were to predict an outcome here, it’s that “Thank you, Brandon,” which makes absolutely no sense, will soon disappear, while “Let’s go, Brandon,” which is at least subversive and fun (to a point), will stick around. “For any slogan to take off, it really needs to mean something for people,” says the sociologist Jen Schradie, who wrote a 2019 book on digital activism, The Revolution That Wasn’t.