Leon Kennedy Meets Donald Trump

Submission 1,236

Part of a series on Resident Evil / Biohazard. [View Related Entries]

About

Leon Kennedy Meets Donald Trump refers to a viral AI-generated image of Resident Evil character Leon Kennedy shaking hands with former United States President Donald Trump. The image has repeatedly gone viral on social media since it emerged in early 2023, often paired with humorous dialogue in which Trump expresses gratitude to Leon over dealing with crises in Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 4.

Origin

On April 8th, 2023, Redditor MasterWizardSam036 posted an AI-generated image of Resident Evil character Leon Kennedy and former U.S. President Donald Trump shaking hands inside the White House (authorship unconfirmed). The post (shown below) received over 1,100 upvotes in the /r/OneyPlays^[1] subreddit in 10 months.

Spread

Later on April 8th, 2023, X^[2] / Twitter user @hayasaka_aryan captioned the image with humorous dialogue that referenced the events of Resident Evil 4 and in which Donald Trump expressed gratitude to Leon for saving his daughter Ivanka Trump. The post (shown below) garnered over 930 reposts and 6,000 likes in one year.

On April 11th, X^[3] user @ascensionpost posted the image with another caption, this time referencing the events of Resident Evil 2 and parodying Trump's manner of speech. The post (shown below) received over 11,000 reposts and 77,000 likes in 10 months. On April 12th, Tumblr^[4] user hotvampireadjacent posted a screenshot of the post, which received over 7,400 likes and reblogs on the platform in the same period.

In the following days, more similar posts appeared on 4chan^[5] and Soyjak.party,^[6] with screenshots reposted on Reddit and other sites. On April 15th, 2023, YouTube^[7] user bluejay211 posted an AI voice video based on the meme that garnered over 209,000 views in 10 months (shown below).

More humorous caption memes based on the image appeared through the second half of 2023, with the image again resurging in February 2024 following a viral repost by the X^[8] account @NoContextCrap.