The Memes That Defined 2025

As the year comes to an end, I’m really at a loss for where to start recapping 2025’s top meme-ories. I’d wager that the inhumane detention of immigrants, the dismantling of arts funding throughout the United States, a government shutdown, SNAP benefits dangling by a thread, and the trickling release of Epstein file batches were at least partially responsible for harshing the vibes, but I still have to hold JD Vance and Elon Musk accountable for taking turns in bludgeoning the concept of humor with a spiked baseball bat in the thick of it all.

What I can say about 2025 is that humor, especially the derisive sort, is the primary weapon in moments of profound incompetence, ignorance, and injustice far beyond our control. Here are the 12 meme moments that made our list.

JD Vance: Act I

Following the couch memes of 2024, there was a slow lead into a great crescendo in continuing to hold down the US Vice President as an unrespectable laughingstock. It took until March of this year for new material to take shape, and that shape was round. After a tense Oval Office meeting between President Trump, JD Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky went totally south once Vance asked if Zelensky “ever said thank you once” for US aid throughout the deadly Russian invasion, the display of unseriousness swelled the internet with memes that fashioned Vance’s headshot into a bloated, bald (or sometimes mullet-ed).

I’ll be honest and say I didn’t really get it at first. I even called it “a miserable attempt at ‘taking back our power,’ or whatever,” when the meme dough was still leavening, but I was ignorant. Only in Act III did I understand its real power. Stay tuned …

Signalgate

Discussing international war crimes in a group chat is one thing, but inadvertently adding a journalist as a group member had many of us at a loss for words. That's exactly what happened when Trump’s national security advisor, Michael Waltz, added the Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg to "Houthi PC small group" on Signal. And in that brazen show of incompetence at its most unfathomable was a goldmine for some of the most hysterical memes of the year. Granted, they had a truly incredible event to springboard off of, but the digital commentary went toe-to-toe with the idiocy displayed by our nation’s most powerful. 

I wish I could say this was the lowest moment of 2025, but we both know that it truly does get worse 💔.

Katy Perry's Zero Gravity Moment(s)

It may as well have been several lifetimes ago, but alas, it was only April when Katy Perry and the rest of the all-women, celebrity-studded crew boarded Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket to experience a few moments of weightlessness without the side effects of Ozempic.

It was a pretty lofty last-ditch attempt for Perry, who has been patently struggling with regaining her early-2010s relevancy after a profound commercial downturn and series of failed image reinventions, including a 2024 studio album produced by Dr. Luke that ironically had a lead single called “Woman’s World,” also produced by Dr. Luke.  

The internet has never been kind to Perry, really, but between the internet commentators and the ruthless trolls, the backlash and memes after the space trip left Perry feeling like a “human piñata.” The criticism boiled down to this: For a pop star, the move was pretty off-key from a feminist standpoint, a class standpoint, and an environmental standpoint — and she sealed her fate with the over-the-top kissing of the ground at the end of her extraterrestrial endeavor.

JD Vance: Act II

At 88 and with chronic respiratory problems, Pope Francis was already ailing in the days before his death, but that really couldn’t stop anybody from pinning the blame on Vance, who paid the late Pope a visit at the Vatican on Easter Sunday, less than 24 hours before he passed on. 

Some skewered the Vice President, who is a Catholic convert in his adulthood, as the antichrist, the devil, and a corrupt soul that drove the Pope to his death; others characterized the meeting as the Pope holding on just long enough to give Vance a piece of his mind to his face — especially after he repeatedly called out the Trump administration’s aggression toward immigrants as antithetical to the teachings of Christ. 

Either way, the world humorously surmised that it couldn’t have been a coincidence.

What Really Happens During the Papal Conclave?

Even with Vance out on the loose, we can’t just not have a Pope, right? Well, that's what I gathered from everyone else’s recounting of Conclave (2024). Even with the movie illuminating some of the ancient and secret practices in selecting a new Pope, those of us on the sidelines had a little too much fun speculating about the origins of the smoke in early May while all eyes were on the Vatican.

Also worth noting that a seagull or two stole the spotlight during news coverage of the days-long ritual … and CBS caught some flak after a news anchor deployed the term “rawdogging it” in reference to the Cardinals time away from all electronics throughout the process.

Trump and Musk's Public Breakup

We all knew it was written in the stars from the inception of their fragile bromance, but Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s public breakup brings us only midway through the year. After axing federal jobs left, right, and center while steering the newfound Department of Government Efficiency (I won’t dignify it with its acronym), Musk moved to amicably exit the Trump administration at the end of May, but not without some parting words about the “pork-filled” Big Beautiful Bill after Trump reneged on selecting Musk’s pick, Jared Isaacman, to lead NASA. 

The pair had virtual shit-flinging meltdowns on their respective social media platforms — Trump painted Musk out to be a “big-time drug addict,” and Musk called for Trump’s impeachment and said that Trump being in the Epstein files was the reason they hadn’t been released yet. 

Though they may have made up a few times since then, the public behavior coloring the Elonald breakup yielded endless content about the fragility of both men’s egos.

JD Vance: Act III

What we’ve all been waiting for is now here: Mads Mikkelsen, a Norwegian tourist to the United States, was deported shortly after touching down at Newark Liberty International Airport on June 11, for myriad reasons — allegedly including but not limited to an autosaved photo of the aforementioned JD Vance meme in a WhatsApp folder on his phone that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers found during a search. 

Mikkelsen clarified to Hyperallergic in an interview that his deportation didn’t only hinge on the Vance meme that the officers called “illegal” and “dangerous;” they also needled him over a photo of a homemade wooden tobacco pipe that they classified as “narcotic paraphernalia.”

The Feds’ story still remains murky, but the JD Vance meme’s power reached its final form when a web developer created an app that transformed anybody’s uploaded flight boarding pass into the JD Vance meme, forcing Transportation Security Administration agents to view the meme while scanning the passes on a mobile device.

Coldplay Couple Scandal

Public shaming is so back as of July, when a Jumbotron at a Coldplay concert inadvertently revealed an extramarital affair between a company’s lead executive and its head of human resources. Caught between a rock and a hard place, both parties — neither of whom were particularly well-known in any sense of the word — resigned from the company within days of the scandal … But not without being flogged relentlessly by netizens who simultaneously embraced the surveillance state AND a mob mentality as a convenient distraction from our broader misery and the lack of control we have over our own lives. 

Sadly, both affair participants’ partners were collateral damage in the scandal’s explosion. It wasn’t just a meme, but rather a case study on empathy, privacy, personal accountability, and the importance of knowing how to play it cool on the spot.

Nothing Beats a Jet2 Holiday

What started as an upbeat advertisement for budget family travel packages devolved into a cult classic TikTok sound used over clipped-together videos of people’s vacations gone totally awry. Everyone has that nightmarish travel story, and the Jet2 Holiday sound allowed us to both commiserate and playfully one-up each other in holidays from hell. As we learn year after year, misery loves company.

Hero With a Hero

Subway has lost its relevance after the fall of the five-dollar footlong, but another man may have moved the needle back in their favor this summer when he lobbed a Subway sandwich at US Customs and Border Protection officers in early August. As we learned with the Water Jug of Justice last year, the resistance loves to repurpose innocuous objects in the fight against fascism.

The hero-hurling hero, Sean Charles Dunn, was arrested and charged with felony assault after the sandwich struck an officer in the chest, but was acquitted by a jury on November 6, in spite of the victim testifying that he “could feel it through [his] ballistic vest.” 

The Louvre Heist

Within minutes of the jaw-dropping daytime heist at the Musée du Louvre in October, the internet was alight with memes about the Wile E. Coyote-esque ingenuity of the incident, the museum’s poor security model, and what could have possibly happened to the nation’s crown jewels, which are still at large today. Even the company that manufactured the stolen basket crane used in the heist got in on the joke at the Louvre's expense.

To the museum’s own dismay, the heist put the spotlight on the building’s totally outdated infrastructure that have since been emphasized through a water leak, structural concerns, and the reported revelation of an extremely obvious security system password.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s New York

In light of loser former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s last-ditch, Islamophobic remarks about Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s faith in relation to terrorism in New York City, as well as the pearl-clutching characterizations of Mamdani’s progressive campaign policies as communist, people delivered on making the rich’s fears a reality through memes after the election was called. As a spry and savvy 34-year-old, Mamdani is no stranger to being meme-d throughout his campaign after winning the Democratic primary election, and overwhelmingly won the youth vote with promises of an affordable New York through robust campaigning citywide.

Just remember: While we laugh now, we’re absolutely serious about those free buses.

God Promised Minnesota to the Somali People

Squeezing into this year’s discourse at the last minute, the Somali diaspora in the US has flipped the script after Trump called the Somali people “garbage” and as ICE takes aim at Minnesota, which has the largest Somali population nationwide. 

The diasporic population has since taken to the web to emphasize that “Minnesota was promised to the Somali people 3,000 years ago,” riffing off of the Zionist talking point frequently invoked in defense of Israel’s decimation of Gaza and settler expansion into the Occupied West Bank. The joke has since evolved to insinuate that the nation’s founding fathers were Somali, and 

While I love that this tongue-in-cheek, absurdist response trolls Trump’s attempts to whitewash US history and comes to the defense of Palestinians simultaneously, I do have my concerns about the very real consequences of ICE’s unchecked attacks and racial profiling. 

Special thank you to Isa Farfan, Maya Pontone, Hrag Vartanian, and Lisa Yin Zhang for their contributions to this post.

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