What is Texts From Hillary?

Texts From Hillary is a two panel image macro built on a 2011 Reuters photograph of Hillary Clinton reading her BlackBerry aboard a military flight, paired with fake texts from other public figures.

Where did Texts From Hillary come from?

Washington, D.C. public relations workers Adam Smith and Stacy Lambe launched the Tumblr on April 4, 2012, with a first post pairing Clinton and Barack Obama.

What does Texts From Hillary mean?

The joke reads Clinton's calm expression as unimpressed authority, with each image imagining a text conversation where she gives a short reply to someone more excitable.

How do you use Texts From Hillary?

Stack two panels vertically: Clinton on top with her supposed reply, and another figure on the bottom sending the incoming message, letting the tone contrast do the work.

Is Texts From Hillary still popular?

The Tumblr closed on April 11, 2012 after the creators met Clinton at the State Department, but the underlying photo kept resurfacing around her later political career.

Texts From Hillary

2012image macroclassic

Published August 6, 2026

Texts From Hillary is a 2012 image macro built on a Reuters photo of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reading her BlackBerry aboard a military plane. The single topic Tumblr paired her image with fake texts from other public figures, going viral within 48 hours before its creators shut it down a week later.

political satire memes single serving site memes tumblr memes two panel memes 2012 memes

Overview

Texts From Hillary is a vertical, two panel image macro built on a Reuters photograph of Hillary Clinton typing on her BlackBerry aboard a military C-17 Globemaster III aircraft1. The photo showed her in dark sunglasses on an October 2011 flight from Malta to Tripoli, and its tight, cinematic framing made it instantly workable as a meme template3.

Each post paired the Hillary panel with a second panel of another public figure texting her, with her replies typically curt and unimpressed. Fake exchanges featured Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and other political and celebrity figures, with the humor turning on Clinton's projection of calm, in-control authority1.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

Tumblr

Creator

Adam Smith and Stacy Lambe

Date

2012

The Tumblr Texts From Hillary launched on April 4, 2012, when friends Adam Smith and Stacy Lambe, both working in Washington, D.C. public relations, posted a first image pairing Clinton with Barack Obama3. That opening post gathered 9,094 notes on Tumblr in the first 48 hours, and Smith later told Mashable the pair came up with the concept after a few drinks one night.

The underlying Reuters photograph had been taken by Kevin Lamarque on October 18, 2011, as Clinton awaited departure from Malta. A different angle of the same moment ran in a TIME cover story on White House photographer Diana Walker in November 20112.

How It Spread

BuzzFeed Politics ran the images first on April 5, 2012, and the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Mashable, and Yahoo! News all picked it up the same day1. By April 6, the images had been shared roughly 46,100 times and liked 172,000 times on Facebook, and by April 11 the Tumblr had passed 45,000 followers.

A member of Clinton's staff reached out to Smith and Lambe on April 9, and the pair met the Secretary at the State Department on April 10. Clinton gave them autographed copies of a submission she had posted to their site herself, and two days later the creators shut the blog down, saying it was time to stop while they were ahead3.

The photo kept resurfacing afterward. When Clinton joined Twitter on June 10, 2013, her first tweet nodded to the meme and she used the BlackBerry image as her avatar. The same photograph came back into public attention in 2015 and 2016 as her private email use became a story, at which point the meme's original image was tied to real questions about how she handled official communications.

How to Use This Meme

The Texts From Hillary format typically stacks two square panels vertically. The top panel is the Reuters shot of Clinton in sunglasses with a text bubble showing her supposed reply. The bottom panel shows another public figure typing what they supposedly sent her. The comedy usually depends on the contrast between an earnest or panicked message from below and Hillary's short, unbothered reply1.