How the Trump assassination attempt was memed

When I woke up on Sunday morning and began scrolling through Twitter, it took me a good 20 seconds to figure out that someone had tried to assassinate Donald Trump. Before I saw any headlines or the now iconic photograph of the former President raising his fist, I had to piece together what happened through a series of impenetrable jokes. This is how I’ve learned about most major news events of the last ten years: not through a sombre radio announcement or the drama of a breaking news report flashing on a TV screen, but hasty photoshops, repurposed song lyrics, tweets referencing older tweets and clips from The Real Housewives.

Not every news story is greeted with this treatment – even in a culture as trivial as our own, some topics are still off-limits. Whenever a beloved and uncontroversial celebrity dies, people rush to post heartfelt tributes, personal anecdotes and black-and-white photos, rather than jokes. While I’m sure it exists, I’m fortunate not to reside in the corner of the internet where school shootings are considered an acceptable subject of humour. But in all but the most extreme cases, there is no universal consensus about which events are considered fair game for mockery and which demand an atmosphere of po-faced seriousness.

It usually depends on which side you’re on, and most of us are probably hypocrites. When the husband of Nancy Pelosi (former Democrat speaker of the house) was bludgeoned with a hammer by a far-right conspiracy theorist, the response of many conservatives was to gleefully speculate that he was a closeted gay man and the attacker was a male sex worker. But now that violence has come for their guy, we are expected to enter into a period of sober contemplation about the coarsening of political discourse; we are expected to bow our heads and apologise for having ever uttered a word of criticism.

There’s no surprise there, but the inconsistency of the Democrats since Saturday night has been even more absurd. Liberals have spent months if not years campaigning on the idea that Trump is a would-be dictator who poses an existential threat to democracy; many have compared him to Hitler and described him as a fascist. (Conservatives already tried to blame this rhetoric for the assassination attempt but, while a motive has yet to be established – the shooter was a registered Republican – it seems unlikely he was driven to extremism by Joe Biden speeches, columns in the Washington Post or the podcast Mueller, She Wrote.) If the Democrats truly believed that Trump is as dangerous as they’ve been claiming, would they still be sending their condolences, pausing their campaign and insisting that we all – regardless of our political views – treat this event as a great American tragedy? It makes no sense to compare Trump to Hitler and then, in the next breath, scold people for failing to display sufficient concern for his safety.

To reject political violence is a legitimate viewpoint in itself, but it rings hollow from the Democrats at a time when their President is helping to rain down death on a civilian population. It might have been a tragedy if the shooter hadn’t missed, but it would not have been sadder or more unjust than the death of a single Palestinian child. At the risk of paraphrasing the Joker, we’re expected to consider one scenario to be a normal occurrence and the other a shocking aberration. Posting an image of a bloody-eared Trump as a Lana del Rey album might be one way of rejecting that logic.

It’s possible to joke about something while also taking it seriously. On my social media feeds on Sunday, the news was met with a sense of foreboding and despair. Whether rightly or wrongly, lots of people assumed that the shooting would secure Trump’s victory, instigate further violence and act as a “Reichstag fire” moment that would usher in a crackdown on civil liberties. It seemed that it was often the people who had the most to lose from a second Trump term – the LGBTQ+ community, left-wing activists, migrants, people from racialised minorities, women concerned about losing their reproductive rights – who were having the most fun. Rather than an expression of indifference, this was a form of gallows humour, which isn’t necessarily a good thing – it contains a trace of nihilism, weary resignation and the acceptance of defeat. But if Trump had pledged to curtail the freedoms and worsen, if not destroy, the lives of so many Americans – no-one can demand that these people wring their hands and perform respect.