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After a gunman attacked Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, the first pieces of media to emerge were striking photographs of Trump, with blood trickling down his face, pumping his fist defiantly as Secret Service officers 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 era of political crisis and conflict.” (Trump later gloated, “Usually you have to die to have an iconic picture.”) As many have noted, these pictures are the documents of the incident which are presumably destined for the history books. In the present, though, public perception is influenced just as much by how the shooting gets digested and distributed online as countless fragments of viral content. Fittingly, for an event involving a former President notorious for spreading disinformation and inanity online, the assassination attempt on Trump suggests just how rapidly today’s social platforms can distort a deadly serious news event into misleading tidbits and gleefully empty jokes.
Trump has been a creature of the Internet since before he was a Presidential contender, but prior to this weekend his peak of online 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 own relatively unpopular platform, Truth Social. Trump’s most recent talked-about moments on the wider Internet were less than heroic. There was his glowering mug shot from the Fulton County Jail, in Atlanta, and pictures of him apparently dozing off in court during his hush-money trial, in New York. But those events occurred back when the 2024 Presidential election still seemed like a sleepy contest between two familiar candidates retreading a previous matchup. With the assassination attempt, Trump has become social media’s main character once more, and on the Internet, at least, the main character is always the winner.
Twitter used to feel like part of journalism’s “first rough draft of history,” a real-time record of current events. Now, as X, with its content moderation gutted and news articles deprioritized, the platform is more like a particle collider chaotically remixing bits of content to produce the most attention-grabbing memes. Taken together, the memes about the rally shooting represent a collective yawp of confusion over how to process such an extreme incident through such fundamentally trivializing channels. One discomfiting thing is how easily an act of deadly political violence has been slotted into all the usual meme templates. On X, pro-Trump partisans drew on the overused trope of “Renaissance paintings,” praising the dignity of the Trump photographs from the rally as well as their propagandistic potential. On TikTok, a young woman looped the shooting into the mania surrounding the pop musician Charli XCX’s recent album “BRAT” and its self-affirming attitude: “Does anyone else kinda think that getting shot in the head and then being completely fine afterwards is, like, really, really ‘BRAT’ summer though?” she said to the camera. A post on 4chan, copied to TikTok, imagined the spirit of Shinzo Abe, the former Japanese Prime Minister who was assassinated in 2022, telling Trump to get up. It’s funny, I guess, but only in the bleakest way. At this point, can we expect anything besides whimsical nihilism from our online response to breaking news?
Lately, the phrase “brain rot” has been used to describe a thoroughly Internet-poisoned state of mind. Those with brain rot speak in social-media slang and meme references. They see the world as so much fodder for the TikTok algorithm. The media, of course, has always viewed tumultuous historical moments as good material. As the sports-business analyst Darren Rovell said in a tweet from 2016, since deleted, “i feel bad for our country. But this is tremendous content.” What is disorientingly new about today’s Internet is how rapidly and vigorously extraordinary events become little more than their recycled parts. After news broke that President Biden had called Trump in the shooting’s aftermath, videos on TikTok imagined a budding romance between the two. One clip, set to “Casual,” by Chappell Roan, another pop star of the moment, has been watched by millions of users, making it, de facto, an influential document of the times. The form of the content—its production value and valence, like a subatomic particle’s spin—surpasses the underlying raw material. The attempted assassination of a former President is treated with the same catholic flippancy as a pop album or a Chinese glycine factory’s ads. (As one post on X put it, “u think people in the 1800s were being this funny when john wilks booth shot lincoln”?) The result is not quite satire; it is absurdism without insight, our new lingua franca online. What qualifies as important is inextricable from what goes viral, and vice versa. “ ‘BRAT’ summer” has the same weight as an act of political violence, and thus the two are inevitably mixed to create something even more clickable. Meaning matters less than recognizability, the split second of understanding the joke.
A fog has always descended over the Internet when news breaks; legitimate reporting competes for attention with hair-trigger takes and intentional disinformation. But it is becoming harder and harder online to emerge with a clear picture of reality. When the first reports trickled in on Saturday, it was difficult to know if the shooting was even real and not some glitch of algorithmic confusion or figment generated by artificial intelligence. Perhaps you found yourself searching those first photographs of a defiant Trump for signs of A.I. hands; it’s become a necessary habit to think that way. The general air of confusion helped fuel an outpouring of conspiracy theories about the assassination attempt on both the right and the left: it was faked in order to help Trump; it was the job of the deep state. Some meme-makers went to elaborate lengths to give such theories visibility. On X, #Staged became a top-trending hashtag. As much as the news itself, the deluge of meta-content is overwhelming. Some of the most reasonable memes I’ve seen in recent days have channelled the public’s ambivalence about a Presidential election that suddenly seems far too dramatic. You may have heard the news about Trump’s rally and had the urge to simply carry on with your Chipotle order, as one post on X suggested. Elsewhere, a screen capture of Squidward, the morose character from “SpongeBob SquarePants,” was edited to wear a pin reading “I really wish I weren’t living through a major historical event right now!” Perhaps, as the TikTok generation often puts it, the meme made you feel seen. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
