After a gunman attacked Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, the first bits of media to emerge were startling photos of Trump, blood streaming down his face, defiantly throwing a punch as police officers The Secret Service escorted him off the stage. My colleague Benjamin Wallace-Wells described this scene, as captured by Evan Vucci of the Associated Press, as “the indelible image of our age of crisis and political conflict.” have an iconic look.†) As many have pointed out, these photographs are documents of the incident which are apparently destined for the history books. Nowadays, however, public perception is influenced as much by how the shots are digested and distributed online as countless bits of viral content. Fittingly, for an event involving a former President known for spreading misinformation and stupidity online, the assassination attempt on Trump suggests how quickly today’s social platforms can twist a serious, deadly news event into fake news. and idle jokes full of joy.
Trump has been an Internet creature since before he was a presidential contender, but before this weekend the height of his Internet infamy seemed to be behind him. He once dominated Twitter, now X, but he no longer posts there, even though Elon Musk, the platform’s owner, lifted a ban on Trump’s account; for a while, his online footprint was limited to his relatively unpopular platform, Truth Social. Trump’s most recent talked about moments on the wider internet were less than heroic. There was his glowing mug shot from the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, and photos of him apparently napping in court during his hush money trial in New York. But those events occurred when the 2024 presidential election still looked like a sleeper contest between two popular candidates revisiting an earlier matchup. With the assassination, Trump has once again become the main character of social media and online, at least, the main character is always the winner.
Twitter once felt like part of journalism’s “first rough history project,” a real-time record of current events. Now, while X, with its content moderation broken and news articles de-prioritized, the platform is more like a particle collider that chaotically remixes pieces of content to produce the catchiest memes. Taken together, the memes surrounding the rally shooting represent a collective confusion over how to process such an extreme incident through such fundamentally trivial channels. One disturbing thing is how easily an act of deadly political violence has slipped into all the usual meme templates. At X, pro-Trump partisans drew on the overused trope of “Renaissance paintings,” extolling the dignity of Trump’s rally photos as well as their propaganda potential. On TikTok, a young woman took a shot at the frenzy surrounding pop musician Charli XCX’s latest album “BROTHER— and his self-affirming stance: –Does anyone else think that getting shot in the head and then being totally fine afterwards is, really, really?BROTHER“Still summer?” she said to the camera. A post on 4chan, copied on TikTok, imagined the spirit of Shinzo Abe, the former Japanese prime minister who was assassinated in 2022, telling Trump to stand up. It’s funny, I guess, but only in the darkest way. At this point, can we expect anything but whimsical nihilism from our online response to breaking news?
Recently, the phrase “brain rot” has been used to describe a state of mind thoroughly poisoned by the Internet. Those with brain rot speak in social media lingo and meme references. They see the world as a lot of fodder for the TikTok algorithm. The media, of course, have always seen turbulent historical moments as good material. As sports business analyst Darren Rovell said in a since-deleted tweet from 2016, “I feel bad for our country. But this is exceptional content. What is disorientingly new about today’s Internet is how quickly and powerfully extraordinary events become little more than their recycled parts. After news broke that President Biden had called Trump after the shooting, videos on TikTok imagined a blossoming romance between the two. A clip, set to “Casual”, by Chappell Roan, another pop star of the moment, has been viewed by millions of users, making it, de facto, an influential document of the time. The form of content—its production value and valence, like the spin of a subatomic particle—transcends the underlying raw material. The assassination attempt on a former President is treated with the same Catholic conceit as a pop album or an advertisement for a Chinese wisteria factory. (As one X post put it, “you think people in the 1800s were getting so funny when John Wilks Booth shot Lincoln”?) The result isn’t quite satire; it’s absurdity without knowledge, our new internet language. What is deemed important is inseparable from what goes viral and vice versa. “ ‘BROTHER“Vera” carries the same weight as an act of political violence, and so the two are inevitably mixed together to create something even more clickable. Meaning is less important than recognition, the split second of understanding the joke.
A fog has always descended on the Internet when news breaks; legitimate reporting competes for attention with hair-raising and deliberate misinformation. But it’s getting harder and harder online to come up with a clear picture of reality. When the first reports came out on Saturday, it was hard to know if the shootings were real and not an algorithmic or AI-generated confusion glitch. You may have found yourself searching the first photos of a defiant Trump for signs of AI’s hands; It has become a necessary habit to think this way. The general air of confusion helped fuel a flood of conspiracy theories about the assassination from both the right and the left: it was faked to help Trump; it was the work of the deep state. Some meme creators went to great lengths to give such theories visibility. At X, #Staged became a trending hashtag. As much as the news itself, the deluge of meta-content is overwhelming. Some of the most sensible memes I’ve seen in recent days have channeled the public’s ambivalence about a presidential election that suddenly seems far away. also dramatic. You may have heard the news about the Trump rally and felt like just getting on with your Chipotle order, as a post on X suggested. Elsewhere, a screen capture of Squidward, the wretched character from “SpongeBob SquarePants” , was edited to wear a pin that read “I really wish I wasn’t living through a major historical event right now!”—Maybe, as the TikTok generation often says, the meme made you feel seen. ♦
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