Actor Mark Hamill made big news this week when he posted an AI generated image of President Trump laying in a shallow grave. The caption began “If only…” The White House was quick to respond, calling him “one sick individual.”
.@MarkHamill is one sick individual.
These Radical Left lunatics just can’t help themselves.
This kind of rhetoric is exactly what has inspired three assassination attempts in two years against our President. pic.twitter.com/daJqcyssm7
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 7, 2026
Hamill, who still does work as a voice actor, seems to have thought better of wishing President Trump was dead and deleted the post. He then posted another one in which he vaguely apologized and claimed people had misunderstood his point.
Accurate Edit for Clarity: “He should live long enough to… be held accountable for his… crimes.” Actually, I was wishing him the opposite of dead, but apologize if you found the image inappropriate. 💙-mh
— Mark Hamill (@markhamillofficial.bsky.social) May 7, 2026 at 12:11 PM
Others didn’t even pretend to be sorry. One response read, “Your post made it to the White House and you got called out. Congratulations, well done.”
I saw all of this Thursday when it happened and thought it was sad to see an actor who played one of my childhood favorite characters behaving like this. But what I didn’t realize at the time is that Hamill’s outburst is actually part of a trend on the left.
Today the Washington Post reports that there is a whole world of videos on TikTok where young progressives try to come as close as possible to calling for Trump’s death without actually saying anything that might get them a visit from the Secret Service.
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.
That was posted just 18 days before Cole Allen attempted to storm the White House Correspondent’s Dinner with the goal of killing President Trump. Interest in the “Somebody should do it” trend spiked after Allen’s attack.
This trend didn’t start a few weeks ago. It seems to taken off last February, about a month after Trump took office. A Brooklyn comedian went viral with another clip vaguely suggesting someone should kill Trump.
Tiktoker calls for Elon and Trump to be assassinated @FBI @SecretService pic.twitter.com/41LqPZD1d8
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 17, 2025
As I said, I wasn’t really aware this was part of a trend, but apparently younger people who spend time on TikTok are very aware of it.
Tim Weninger, an associate professor at the University of Notre Dame who studies how social media is wielded to dehumanize enemies, first encountered the trend last fall when a teenage family member happened to scroll upon it. This week, he said, he asked a few students on campus whether they’d seen “Somebody should do it” appeals, too. Every single one, he said, knew what that meant.
In retrospect, I think this is exactly what James Comey was doing when he posted his image of shells he claims he found on the beach. And, as I’ve argued before, while I think Comey very much intended that to have two meanings, charging him for it is never going to succeed. He can easily claim he had no ill intent and create all the reasonable doubt needed. Unless there’s some email where he joked about mocking Trump’s assassination, he’ll never be convicted.
And that’s what this whole trend is really about. Can you say it without saying it in a way that would result in consequences. In short, leftists on TikTok (and elsewhere) have normalized assassination talk.
Do they really mean it? The Post interviewed six people about the trend and most of them said it was just a way to vent, but at least one said she hoped someone would really do it.
Grace, a 26-year-old university employee in Louisiana, said it felt like writing in her diary when she logged onto X and typed “somebody should do it” to her few hundred followers…
“I don’t have a violent bone in my body,” she said. “I’d never do it myself.”
But Grace would be happy, she said, if someone happened to kill Trump.
“Literally,” she said.
I suspect that’s a lot more common on the left than this 6-person survey suggests. The whole point is to say it without saying it. If you admit you really mean it, you’ve failed to play the game properly.
Most of remember how many people seemed eager to celebrate the assassination of Charlie Kirk in the weeks after his death. Kirk was well known but nothing compared to Trump. If Trump were assassinated, I suspect there would be hundreds of thousands if not millions of people on the left celebrating, led by a lot of very well-known celebrities.
Do the memes have any impact on real life? That’s harder to say, but we can say that there have been three assassination attempts so far and the number of threats is striking. Here’s a list of some recent ones that resulted in a law enforcement response.
- Dean DelleChiaie – An FAA worker from New Hampshire threatened to kill Trump last month. He had previously done searches on how to get a gun into a federal facility.
- Nathaniel Sanders – Out of Florida. The FBI got a tip which led them to threats to bomb the White House and also to kill Melania Trump and Sec. Marco Rubio.
- Michael Kovco – Chicago man threatened to kill Trump and his son Barron. He sent a message to the WH website saying it came from “Mr. I’m going to f***ing kill your child Kovco”
- Andrew D. Emerald – From Massachusetts, he repeatedly threatened to kill Trump on Facebook. When the FBI showed up, he brandished a sword.
- Shawn Monper – From Butler, PA. He pleaded guilty last month to threatening to murder Trump. He called himself Mr. Satan on YouTube and got a firearm permit not long after Trump’s 2nd inauguration.
All of those cases are fairly recent, and there are more if you keep going back to last year. Again, you can’t directly connect the death threats to the memes about killing Trump. These individuals may or may not have seen those memes. But what you can say for sure is there is a lot of assassination talk and thoughts circulating out there. It’s not hard to find at this point. It’s everywhere out in the open.
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