Newstalk ZB
Peyton Vanest was fuming about United States President Donald Trump when he grabbed his phone and hit record. “Somebody should,” he declared, pausing for dramatic effect. “Somebody should, you know? “If somebody knew what needed to be done, that person should probably just do it …” the 27-year-old progressive influencer continued, conspicuously not defining “it”. Then he uploaded the 62-second video to TikTok, where it accumulated more than 700,000 likes and 3.2 million views. His version on Instagram garnered another 1.4 million views. “Crazy how we all know exactly what you’re talking about,” one of thousands of commenters replied. Vanest’s vague plea – posted 18 days before the third apparent attempt on Trump’s life in less than two years – is part of a social media trend that has twisted the idea of a presidential assassination into a morbid joke. Once an unseemly feature of the web’s fringes, deliberately ambiguous chatter about political violence has spread on mainstream platforms over the past year – 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. “Somebody should do it” and its online variants, the authors wrote, is wink-nudge shorthand for suggesting that somebody kill a powerful person. One of the earliest cases to go viral was a TikTok video from a Brooklyn comedian nebulously talking about “all the Elon, Trump stuff”. In the February 2025 post, he said someone should “throw their life away” and “take one for the team”. The conservative Libs of TikTok reposted the clip. So did Musk, helping it rack up 48 million views. “Everybody dies, but not everybody lives,” the tech titan jabbed back on X. The comedian declined to comment. Know Your Meme found that interest in the “Somebody should do it” trend spiked after an armed man’s thwarted attack last month at the White House correspondents’ dinner in Washington, where Trump was scheduled to speak. Researchers who study how violence multiplies told the Washington Post they are concerned about the posts’ reach and impact. 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. This week, he said, he asked a few students on campus whether they’d seen “Somebody should do it” appeals, too. Every single one, he said, knew what that meant. “I’ve never seen it quite like this,” Weninger said of America’s seeming comfort level with murder gibes. “People are in a dark place.” Normalisation of formerly taboo rhetoric – from both ends of the political spectrum – can sound like encouragement, he said, to somebody in the grip of a mental health crisis. The Post interviewed six people who described a range of complex and sometimes contradictory reasons for posting their own spin on “Somebody should do it”. Most characterised their posts as a way to vent rage against a US Administration they say is committing actual violence against its citizens. Most say they weren’t appealing for Trump’s assassination. Some said killing the US President would actually make the world worse; they didn’t want him glorified as a martyr. One woman, though, acknowledged that she did hope somebody would kill Trump. “Anyone who engages in or endorses political violence or assassination culture must be condemned in the harshest terms possible,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said. “They 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.” Vanest, whose April 7 video was among the meme format’s most widely viewed, insists that he was not advocating violence against the US President or anyone else. He didn’t think people watching his video would assume that, either. Nobody has contacted him to say he...
Go to News Site