Kamala Harris is ‘Brat,’ says Charli XCX. Pop’s resident ‘it’ girl would know.

Slime green, clubbing and self-awareness are dominating pop culture this season. Now “Brat summer” has made its way into politics.

“Kamala IS brat,” Charli XCX, whose album Brat came out June 7, posted on X. Hours before, President Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris.

Harris’s campaign seems to be embracing the concept of Brat, adopting the bright green hue and simplistic font of Charli XCX’s album cover as the banner image for its official X account. Harris herself has not yet responded to the influx of Brat memes and fancams, but they’re flooding social media sites from X to TikTok.

What does it mean to be Brat?

By definition, to be a brat is to misbehave. On Charli XCX’s album, she sings about her own sadness and insecurity in her life choices and friendships — while still celebrating her success and her love of partying. Society rarely allows women to be openly confident and openly sad at the same time. Brat behavior stands in defiance of that.

“You’re just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes,” Charli XCX said of the term in a TikTok video. “Who feels like herself but maybe also has a breakdown. But kind of like parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile. Like, does dumb things. But it’s brat. You’re brat. That’s brat.”

We don’t know exactly why Charli XCX thinks Harris is Brat, it’s clear that her laughter and playful remarks have been memed countless times, she’s been endorsed by the president and dozens of other Democrats ahead of the DNC in August. She is both frequently joked about and in the running to lead the country — a brat-like dichotomy.

Who else is celebrating Brat summer?

Brat isn’t the biggest album of the summer, but it has made its mark on pop culture. The music video for the song “360” includes renowned party girls like Julia Fox and Chloë Sevigny, as well as extremely online personalities like Quenlin Blackwell and Emma Chamberlain.

Mainstream celebrities can’t get enough of it, either. Twisters stars Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones repeatedly mentioned Brat while promoting the disaster movie and performed the TikTok dance to Brat track “Apple.” Kyle MacLachlan told Yahoo Entertainment that his song of summer is “Von Dutch,” the lead single from Brat, and later posted a photo with Charli XCX.

The internet has embraced Harris as a meme and a ‘brat’

Even before Biden dropped out of the presidential race, content creators were making “fancam” edits of her speeches and viral moments. Though Biden once sought to hire a “meme manager” to stay on top of internet discourse, Harris’s moment happened organically. Content that is manufactured by presidential candidates with the explicit purpose of going viral is often considered “cringe” to young voters.

One of Harris’s most viral moments, which has led to the spread of the phrase “coconut-pilled” to describe her potential voters and the frequent use of palm tree and coconut emojis, came from one of her 2023 speeches.

“My mother used to — she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” Harris said. “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

Though a bit nonsensical, that has become the rallying cry of her fans. Now, Brat is as well — and even lawmakers are getting in on it.

Ryan Long, a 22-year-old college student, created one of the most viral Harris fancam videos that paired the presidential candidate with imagery from Brat.

“In the current society, you feel really helpless,” Long told the Washington Post. “It’s hard to get politically engaged. All you can do is you can make edits, you can make tweets.”