John Boehner is Using Taylor Swift GIFs to Criticize Obama

John Boehner is known for many things. He is the 61st and current Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, a longstanding member of the Republican Party, and very orange man who Rolling Stone once described as "the hairy blue mold on the American congressional sandwich." Boehner has built a reputation for "sleeping with" lobbyists, standing firmly against immigration, and publicly sobbing in Taco Bell—all great political tactics, but now he's trying to reach the American public through the use of a new universal language: Taylor Swift gifs.

In a post titled "12 Taylor Swift GIFs for you" uploaded to his official government website, John Boehner's staff have carefully selected a series of fan-made gifs that attempt to communicate criticisms of Obama's recent offer to introduce a free community college scheme for lower-income families. Naturally, because this idea is very-loosely rooted in wealth redistribution, conservative America is not a fan.

In an effort to use the princess of current pop culture to frame backdated ideals, the post itself features a level of punmanship that even the Sun would be embarrassed about—“60 billion dollars is a lot of money…you can’t just shake it off” / “And the president knows full well there’s no blank space in the taxpayers’ checkbook” etc—but the real clincher is the byline: By Caleb Smith & Mike Ricci.

Apparently, it took two grown-ass government communications directors to produce a piece of internet content that would have taken a young-Republican tween on Buzzfeed Community less than a minute. To put this all into a British context, the whole thing feels very much like Peter Mannion's botched "I App Britain" speech in The Thick of It. That is, a government official is told to do something vaguely connected to technology in order to encourage the disenchanted youth of today to vote in their favour, fails miserably, the end.

Emma Garland is on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Noisey UK.