Political comedy is hard. Just ask Donald Trump, who recently posted a meme depicting former president Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, as apes. Instead of receiving the Mark Twain Prize for American Humour, Trump was forced to delete the post when many people (specifically Republicans who are getting twitchy about November midterms) didn’t find it funny. Some right-wingers just can’t take a joke.
Online White House funny business isn’t confined solely to the president. In February last year, the White House posted a short video of shackled men being put onto planes and captioned it “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight”. ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response and is social media shorthand for videos that trigger a soothing sensation, commonly aiding with relaxation or sleep. That casually cruel video has had more than 104 million views.
In January, a photograph was taken of civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong, who is black, looking calm and resolute as she was led away after her arrest for protesting against ICE in Minnesota. The White House posted a manipulated version of the photograph to its official X account, showing Armstrong in distress, with tears running down her face. There was no disclaimer stating that the image had been digitally altered using AI. When questioned about the deliberate dissemination of disinformation, Kaelan Dorr, the deputy communications director, reposted the doctored photo, writing: “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.”
Racist memes and other extremist online content have become one of the Trump administration’s most potent and reliable forms of communication with its base. Trump’s post about the Obamas was amateur hour in comparison with the coded messaging of white supremacist ideology that emanates on an almost daily basis from various official Trump administration social media accounts.
Consider the Department of Homeland Security meme titled “Christmas after mass deportations”, which the White House shared on TikTok in December. To the uninitiated, it presents as a bewildering onslaught of imagery, primarily drawn from Christmas movies. An investigation by The Atlantic, however, revealed distinct references to the Agartha meme, which the intended audience of the post, who skew younger and terminally online, would have immediately recognised.
Agartha refers to the myth of a lost underground Aryan civilisation. Ask any teenager who’s on social media if they’ve encountered an Agartha meme and the chances will be very high that they have. Charlie Kirk, often depicted as “the gatekeeper of Agartha”, features heavily in these memes. So do remixes of Men at Work’s Down Under, which is the predominant soundtrack to the videos. When the White House embedded the Agartha meme in a video celebrating mass deportation, they were explicitly linking the online vision of a neo-Nazi, whites-only homeland to real-world actions being undertaken by the US government.
The festive season memes continued with a New Year’s Eve post from the official White House X account featuring an image of Trump and one word: “remigration”. This is a reference to the far-right dream of the forced removal of non-white immigrants and their descendants, even if they’re legal residents. Evidence that white supremacist theory has become the pseudo-intellectual scaffolding underpinning the Trump White House’s online messaging is everywhere, if you know where and how to look.
Another example is a Department of Homeland Security recruitment ad for ICE on Instagram, which featured Uncle Sam at a crossroads with the caption: “Which way, American man?” The coded reference this time is the 1978 book Which Way, Western Man? Considered a seminal text for white nationalists, it advocates violence against Jews and argues that Hitler was right. If the Trump White House does succeed in realising its racially homogenous American utopia, key Jewish figures in the administration, such as Stephen Miller, the mastermind behind Trump’s hardline immigration actions, might have cause to regret leading the MAGA faithful to whiter pastures.
Trump’s vile post about the Obamas broke through to the mainstream because it involved Trump, a still-popular former president and first lady and a racist trope that many people would have immediately understood. While this one post attracted an outcry and was subsequently deleted, the Trump White House’s firehose of hateful online content will continue to spew forth veiled white supremacist content. Most of the poison will encounter little resistance as it passes into the online discourse of primarily younger people.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt deflected criticism of Trump’s post, saying: “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.” Leavitt’s message is an important one: focus on the issues, not the distractions. The only problem is, with this White House, the distractions tell us so very much about where the real issues lie.
Melanie La’Brooy is a novelist who writes on politics and social justice issues.
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Melanie La’Brooy – Melanie La’Brooy is an award-winning novelist who has lived in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East and writes on politics and social justice issues.From our partners
