It’s become one of the defining experiences of modern politics, and it can happen to a foreign leader, a CEO, the governor of an American state: You wake up one morning and find yourself in the center of a social media storm in which Donald Trump has set the terms.
The form it takes is almost entirely visual. There are videos flying around, with or without context; the US government is producing some, promoting others from random X accounts. Dubious photos, winking AI jokes, and TikToks swallow facts and arguments, and Trump and his allies rapidly and cheerfully move from claim to claim. There is not a lot of emphasis on factual claims, press releases, forceful statements.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has found himself in the center of a storm like that since the president announced last month that he would send National Guard troops to Chicago to protect immigration agents. Pritzker has been trying to debunk claims that Chicago is an out-of-control hellhole; to assert in court that the federal government has no right to send in federal troops; and to discredit the tactics by immigration agents to arrest migrants in his state’s streets and businesses.
Pritzker — who took a brief break from the information war (or perhaps he saw it as another front) to talk to Semafor’s media show, Mixed Signals, last week— has tried a lot of things. He’s gone to court and won a stay against deploying the National Guard (Trump has asked the Supreme Court to hear that case) and he’s held press conferences with a diverse array of local leaders who don’t want a federal presence in their city.
But Pritzker, unusual among Trump’s antagonists, has also begun to beat the White House at its own game — the visual, visceral, and at times post-literate politics of 2025.
His press office has taken to sending out text-free press releases composed solely of images of ICE agents pointing guns at civilians. He squeezed into a flak jacket to shoot a dispatch for Jimmy Kimmel from “war-torn Chicago.â€
And most of all, he and his city have managed to drown out the story the White House is trying to tell with their own videos of ICE agents at work.
†I have asked everybody in Chicago: When they see ICE in the neighborhoods, pull your phone out, video everything, or send it to local media. And more and more, that’s exactly what’s happening. Virtually everything that people can video, they are now,†he said.
His government is also watching, he said, with “cameras from state police.†And a federal judge last week ordered federal agents to begin wearing their own body cameras this week.
Those scenes have overwhelmed the Department of Homeland Security’s slickly-produced videos depicting what appear to be well-trained, heavily armed agents conducting precise raids in military vehicles and helicopters. They show what appear to be poorly trained, sometimes out-of-shape agents losing footraces to their targets, ramming a moving car with an unmarked SUV, pointing weapons at protesters, and trying and failing to keep their masks on, all in the face of the obvious, vocal loathing of many Chicagoans who encounter them. (They compete with a parallel stream of videos from the right showing protesters screaming at federal agents, threatening them, and sometimes throwing things.)
In one particularly notable scene, a teenage girl yells that she’s not resisting as an agent pushes her to the ground. Department of Homeland Security’s Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, Tricia McLaughlin responded dismissively on X: “Imagine being so desperate to demonize law enforcement you post a video from a burglary arrest Chicago Police made over a year ago.†But local journalists confirmed the video was of agents detaining a protester. McLaughlin has left the debunked video up, and didn’t respond directly to an inquiry as to why, but said in an email that “we stand by our statement.â€
