Vanest\u2019s vague plea \u2013 posted 18 days before the third apparent attempt on Trump\u2019s life in less than two years \u2013 is part of a social media trend that has twisted the idea of a presidential assassination into a morbid joke. <\/p>\n
Once an unseemly feature of the web\u2019s fringes, deliberately ambiguous chatter about political violence has spread on mainstream platforms over the past year \u2013 most often in reference to Trump and businessman Elon Musk, according to a new report from Know Your Meme, which tracks the rise of viral posts. <\/p>\n
\u201cSomebody should do it\u201d and its online variants, the authors wrote, is wink-nudge shorthand for suggesting that somebody kill a powerful person.<\/p>\n
One of the earliest cases to go viral was a TikTok video from a Brooklyn comedian nebulously talking about \u201call the Elon, Trump stuff\u201d. <\/p>\n
In the February 2025 post, he said someone should \u201cthrow their life away\u201d and \u201ctake one for the team\u201d. The conservative Libs of TikTok reposted the clip. So did Musk, helping it rack up 48 million views. <\/p>\n
\u201cEverybody dies, but not everybody lives,\u201d the tech titan jabbed back on X. The comedian declined to comment.<\/p>\n
Know Your Meme found that interest in the \u201cSomebody should do it\u201d trend spiked after an armed man\u2019s thwarted attack last month at the White House correspondents\u2019 dinner in Washington, where Trump was scheduled to speak.<\/p>\n
Researchers who study how violence multiplies told the Washington Post they are concerned about the posts\u2019 reach and impact. <\/p>\n
Tim Weninger, an associate professor at the University of Notre Dame who studies how social media is wielded to dehumanise enemies, first encountered the trend last northern autumn when a teenage family member happened to scroll upon it. <\/p>\n
This week, he said, he asked a few students on campus whether they\u2019d seen \u201cSomebody should do it\u201d appeals, too. Every single one, he said, knew what that meant.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve never seen it quite like this,\u201d Weninger said of America\u2019s seeming comfort level with murder gibes. \u201cPeople are in a dark place.\u201d<\/p>\n
Normalisation of formerly taboo rhetoric \u2013 from both ends of the political spectrum \u2013 can sound like encouragement, he said, to somebody in the grip of a mental health crisis.<\/p>\n
The Post interviewed six people who described a range of complex and sometimes contradictory reasons for posting their own spin on \u201cSomebody should do it\u201d.<\/p>\n
Most characterised their posts as a way to vent rage against a US Administration they say is committing actual violence against its citizens. <\/p>\n
Most say they weren\u2019t appealing for Trump\u2019s assassination. Some said killing the US President would actually make the world worse; they didn\u2019t want him glorified as a martyr. <\/p>\n
One woman, though, acknowledged that she did hope somebody would kill Trump.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnyone who engages in or endorses political violence or assassination culture must be condemned in the harshest terms possible,\u201d White House spokesman Davis Ingle said. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey should also immediately seek psychiatric help to treat their severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has warped their brains and made them sick in the head.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vanest, whose April 7 video was among the meme format\u2019s most widely viewed, insists that he was not advocating violence against the US President or anyone else. He didn\u2019t think people watching his video would assume that, either. <\/p>\n
Nobody has contacted him to say he inspired them to plot an assassination, he said. <\/p>\n
But what if someone does say they want to act on his message?<\/p>\n
\u201cI wouldn\u2019t report them,\u201d Vanest said \u2013 not immediately \u2013 \u201cbecause I wouldn\u2019t believe that they meant it\u201d.<\/p>\n
He would offer to hop on the phone with them first, Vanest said, and steer them towards a calmer headspace.<\/p>\n
Don Caldwell, editor in chief of Know Your Meme, said that meme culture used to be sillier. Consider former US politician Howard Dean\u2019s oft-remixed viral scream.<\/p>\n
However, by 2015 political discourse had taken a darker turn, Caldwell said, when people began circulating images of Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders getting tossed out of aircraft. <\/p>\n
That trend came to be dubbed \u201cfree helicopter rides\u201d – a nod to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet\u2019s preferred means of disappearing his political enemies.<\/p>\n
US elected officials have waded as well into the digital muck. Then-Representative Paul Gosar (Republican-Arizona) was censured for posting an animated video in November 2021 that depicted him appearing to kill Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and swinging two swords at Joe Biden. <\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone needs to relax,\u201d Gosar\u2019s then-digital director, Jessica Lycos, said at the time in a statement defending the post. <\/p>\n
Trump shared a video in March 2024 that featured an illustration of then-President Joe Biden with his hands and feet tied. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat picture was on the back of a pick-up truck that was travelling down the highway,\u201d Steven Cheung, now a White House spokesman, told the Post back then, adding that Democrats and \u201ccrazed lunatics\u201d have called for \u201cdespicable violence\u201d against Trump.<\/p>\n
Some on the left said they felt compelled to fight rhetorical fire with rhetorical fire.<\/p>\n
The Ghost, a 37-year-old vlogger in Virginia whose political views fall \u201cbetween communism and socialism\u201d, said his post was a response to the Trump Administration\u2019s combative tone. He spoke on the condition that he be identified only by the name he uses on social media, saying he worried about his safety.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe opposition is so loud and shocking that you almost have to match it to be heard,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Grace, a 26-year-old university employee in Louisiana, said it felt like writing in her diary when she logged onto X and typed \u201csomebody should do it\u201d to her few hundred followers.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s policies, she said, are brutal to people she loves, particularly immigrants. Her words, she said, were her little swipe at a man she believes is evil. She spoke on the condition that only her middle name be used because she feared legal repercussions.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t have a violent bone in my body,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019d never do it myself.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Grace would be happy, she said, if someone happened to kill Trump.<\/p>\n
\u201cLiterally,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
This kind of social permission worries violence experts who traced how the infamous mass shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 inspired dozens of similar school attacks.<\/p>\n
\u201cOftentimes, there\u2019s kind of a seminal case,\u201d Jillian Peterson, a forensic psychologist and co-founder of the Violence Prevention Project, said. \u201cOne that gets just tonnes of attention and attraction. That starts the contagion.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the fans of the two Columbine shooters are largely relegated to the internet\u2019s fringes that tolerate their taboo obsessions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s a very, very tiny group,\u201d Peterson said, contrasting those anonymous outsiders with the myriad people publicly embracing Luigi Mangione, the 28-year-old charged with murdering the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare on a New York footpath; celebrating the killing of right-wing political influencer Charlie Kirk; or sharing memes that flick at assassinating the president. Mangione has pleaded not guilty to all charges he faces.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is different, because it feels like we have a big sector of society agreeing at some level with the feeling, the emotion, where it\u2019s coming from,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s a scary reaction.\u201d<\/p>\n
Any debate about the normalising of violent political rhetoric can\u2019t ignore Trump\u2019s role in spreading it, Jeffrey Engel, founding director of the Centre for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, said.<\/p>\n
The head of state, he said, \u201ctraditionally sets the tone for civility and morality in a nation\u201d.<\/p>\n
Over the past decade, in addition to broadcasting the bound Biden illustration, Trump has repeatedly urged his supporters to beat protesters, called opponents \u201ctraitors\u201d and \u201cvermin\u201d, amplified a call to \u201cHANG\u201d Democrats, and described lawmakers\u2019 behaviour as \u201cSEDITIOUS\u201d and \u201cpunishable by DEATH!\u201d<\/p>\n
Although the US Supreme Court has set a high bar for what constitutes unlawful language under its interpretation of the First Amendment, that has not prevented Trump officials from filing criminal cases against the President\u2019s critics for alleged threats. <\/p>\n
Former FBI Director James Comey, a frequent Trump critic whom the President has targeted for his role in investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, was indicted last month for posting on Instagram a photo of seashells arranged in the numbers \u201c86 47\u201d. <\/p>\n
That was the Trump Administration\u2019s second attempt to prosecute Comey; an indictment that alleged he had lied to Congress was dismissed by a judge who said the prosecutor was unlawfully appointed.<\/p>\n
Trump wrote on social media: \u201c\u201886\u2019 is a mob term for \u2018kill him\u2019, \u201886 47\u2019 means \u2018kill President Trump.\u2019\u201d Eighty-six, as Merriam-Webster explains it, is restaurant industry slang that means \u201cto throw out\u201d, \u201cto get rid of\u201d or \u201cto refuse service to\u201d. <\/p>\n
Comey has said he thought the seashells broadcast a political message, not a call to bloodshed, and deleted the image once he noticed some followers were reading it that way.<\/p>\n
Mark, a 43-year-old who works with non-profits, knew what he was doing when he combined Vanest\u2019s clip with his own commentary and posted it to TikTok. <\/p>\n
He knew that he\u2019d be accused of pushing for violence. That, as a father of three young daughters, he might be called irresponsible or, as a supporter of gun control, hypocritical. That he could lose his job. That if a troubled stranger acted on his message, he\u2019d live with that burden forever.<\/p>\n
But none of it changed his mind.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you do it, I\u2019ll chip in the first $50 on the GoFundMe, okay?\u201d he said into the camera, explaining that he suspected many other people would do the same. Mark spoke on the condition his last name not be used because he fears retaliation. <\/p>\n
\u201cFor what, ya know, I don\u2019t think anybody really knows yet. It\u2019s hard to tell what it\u2019s going to be for. But yeah, just know that.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added hashtags: \u201c#america,\u201d \u201c#fdt\u201d (for \u201cf**k Donald Trump\u201d) and \u201c#whenithappens\u201d.<\/p>\n
Mark wouldn\u2019t have embraced the \u201cSomebody should do it\u201d meme during the President\u2019s first term, he said, but that was back when he believed Trump\u2019s election was a mistake the country would one day permanently correct at the ballot box. <\/p>\n
He\u2019s since abandoned that belief and, like many other liberals, anticipates that Trump will resist leaving office at the end of his second term.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you advocating that someone should take a gun and shoot this person in the head? \u2018No\u2019 is the answer to that question,\u201d Mark said. <\/p>\n
\u201cBut at the same time, we\u2019re going to joke about this, and we\u2019re going to say this stuff, because we\u2019re all feeling the most desperate and desolate that we ever have.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor\u2019s Picks<\/a>, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week\u2019s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vanest\u2019s vague plea \u2013 posted 18 days before the third apparent attempt on Trump\u2019s life in less than…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":422630,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1443,3013,651,24004,2178,132252,22403,42,14910,43,5006,216910,16792,2572,1974,2687,3271,10536,9939,27300,40,38,41,39,2179,9938,216911,1316],"class_list":["post-422629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-about","tag-but","tag-close","tag-coming","tag-donald","tag-fuming","tag-grabbed","tag-headlines","tag-kill","tag-news","tag-not","tag-peyton","tag-phone","tag-president","tag-record","tag-saying","tag-should","tag-someone","tag-states","tag-theyre","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-trump","tag-united","tag-vanest","tag-when"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=422629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422629\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/422630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}