An assassination attempt rattled the nation. Then came the memes.
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Alayna Cowan, a college student in Savannah, Ga., learned about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump from a news alert on her phone. She read the accompanying article, which reported that Trump’s health was stable. Then she opened TikTok.
The first thing she saw was a TikTok edit - a video splicing different clips together - featuring images of President Biden talking about trying to reach Trump after the event set to the lovesick Chappel Roan song “Casual.” As she scrolled, she saw video after video in the same vein: The point was that there is no point.
“I laughed,” said the 21-year-old. “I think my generation doesn’t feel seen by either political party, and we’ve dealt with so much during the last eight years. People feel pretty hopeless, so it’s like, let’s just make a joke.”
TikTok, X and other social media platforms were flooded with dark humor in the aftermath of the shooting, which killed one spectator and injured two others. Some expressed glee, disappointment or grief at the attempted assassination of Trump, who escaped with a grazed ear, but many were apolitical, poking fun at mainstream reactions or U.S. presidential politics in general.
The wave of jokes and memes reflect apathy toward presidential politics and a desensitization to violence, especially among younger generations who grew up with rampant political polarization and mass shootings, experts tracking social media and politics say. Many young people say they feel disenfranchised by a two-party system that doesn’t make room for their values. The ripple effects are playing out on social media in the form of memes and screenshots - the jokes are deadpan, often without a clear political point, and appearing moments after the event they’re referencing.
“Give me a song and I’ll reply with either of these,” reads a tweet with two images: One of an ear coated in gold, another of Trump bleeding from the ear. A reshared screenshot got 73,000 likes and 1.4 million views.
A tweet with 79,000 likes shows a person talking to a costumed character at a Disney park: “Me letting Ant Man know Trump has been shot.”
“I would worry a great deal if the significant portion of the American public feels sufficiently disaffected from politics that even when somebody is targeted for assassination, all that it elicits is a sense of the absurd,” said William Howell, a professor at the University of Chicago, who studies U.S. presidential politics. “A lot of people feel like politicians are out of step and ineffective, the legislative process is all but broken, therefore politics becomes a thing of theater,” he said.
More than half of Generation Z teens don’t identify with a major political party, and the majority of Gen Z and millennial adults say America’s political problems require a generational change in leadership, according to 2024 data from the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute. But on the internet, memes and jokes about the Trump shooting got reshared by the young and old alike.
Of course, people have always used gallows humor to cope with national violence - when then president-elect Abraham Lincoln changed his travel routes in 1861 to stay safe from would-be assassins, the magazine Harper’s Weekly published a series of cartoons showing him traipsing around in goofy disguises. Satirical news site the Onion put out an issue dedicated to 9/11 two weeks after the attacks. But the speed of online discourse and the design of social media platforms has changed the way we react to tragedy, said Delia Cai, who writes the popular internet culture newsletter Deez Links.
Bleak humor about national violence - from 9/11 to school shootings - used to play out in niche corners of the internet, Cai said. But now it’s infused the dominant culture, to the point that no matter the political bend of your particular feed, you’re likely to see callous jokes or disassociated commentary. This may reflect broad political sentiment, but it also reflects the incentives of the online economy, Cai said. On social media, attention is currency, and saying something funny draws more eyeballs than saying something earnest.
Over time, those dynamics shape online culture. Millennials were more likely to type a sincere post about national politics, Cai said, but the posts didn’t change how politicians operate. Now, such online sincerity feels performative, and nihilism comes with some serious “cultural capital,” Cai said.
“The prevailing feeling is like, ‘This is like so stupid that it’s below me to comment,’ or, ‘I’ve given up taking things seriously so I’m just making tweets until the asteroid hits,’” she said.
Humor can be a way to dissociate, but it can also be a way to engage, says Ben Collins, CEO of the Onion. His team started writing jokes immediately after the shooting Saturday and put out a digital edition Monday evening, he said. One headline was “Congress bans roofs,” poking fun at politicians’ failure or reluctance to pass sweeping gun reforms. He said the funniest jokes usually come when writers “take a breath,” step back and try to put events in their larger context. In this case, the context was constant gun violence.
“Jokes get us through these moments because otherwise that helplessness can turn into rage,” Collins said.
Some jokes called for a second assassination attempt or berated the shooter for poor aim - both potential violations of a law prohibiting threats from people wishing harm on political figures. Donald Trump may have encouraged such takes with his own habitual flippancy toward important national topics, said satirist Percival Everett, but it doesn’t mean the rest of us should follow suit.
Everett, who has written his share of bloody, ironic humor about American society, said the numb, knee-jerk jokes after Saturday’s shooting struck him as hollow.
“An innocent person died that day. He will not see or be seen by his family again,” Everett said. “Absurd as it, it is no joke.”
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