Right up there with “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” as an instant American classic is what Slate has called “the secretly vulgar chant suddenly beloved by Republicans”—though “secretly vulgar” is an oxymoron, and enthusiasm for the increasingly popular “Let’s Go Brandon” chant is hardly limited to Republicans. It isn’t by way of the country club and the Chamber of Commerce that you arrive at viral meme-hood, I think. Ex-military guys who shop at convenience stores are a different matter. When one of them, a Marine Corps veteran named James Kilcer from Yuma, Arizona, went viral himself by disarming and capturing a gas-station robber, he accepted his award for valor from the Yuma County sheriff’s office wearing a tee-shirt emblazoned with the slogan lets [sic] go brandon over an image of an American flag.

He would have been ill-advised to do that if he were still serving, of course, but I imagine that sales of the shirt will be plentiful among victims of the advertised purge of political “extremists” from the American armed forces. What made the slogan suddenly beloved by me is that its satirical shaft is directed not just at hapless Joe Biden, who is no more capable of inspiring Trumpian levels of hatred than he is Trumpian levels of love. Coined in October 2021 by Kelli Stavast of nbc Sports, when she ostensibly misheard a vulgar chant directed at the President by the crowd at a nascarrace