Peyton Vanest was fuming about 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 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.