On the first Thanksgiving weekend of President Donald Trump’s second term, the Washington Post published a serious scoop about the administration. The Post reported that US military forces, after attacking a civilian boat that the administration claimed was carrying drugs in the Caribbean, had followed up by killing two survivors clinging to the wreckage — allegedly under orders originating with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to “kill everybody.”
Two days later, Hegseth posed a picture on his X account of a fake children’s book cover, modeled on the Franklin the Turtle series. The title was “Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists,” over a picture of the cartoon turtle in US military gear firing a grenade launcher from a helicopter onto boats below, with people still on board.
In the past, a grave allegation like the report in the Post might have produced official responses of concern. But even while administration sources were contesting the notion that Hegseth had personally ordered the follow-up strike, the secretary himself was letting the grinning, weapon-wielding turtle speak for him.
January 26, 2025: Donald Trump shares this AI-generated portrait of himself dressed as a gangster, with the letters FAFO behind him, one of a series of AI portraits he would post throughout the year.
This juxtaposition of serious executive action with smirky internet images was the defining style of official communication by Donald Trump and his team in his first year back in the White House. As the new administration aggressively wielded power on an expanded scale, domestically and abroad, it promoted and defended its moves through a deliberately transgressive, meme-heavy style of communication — copying the forms of internet humor, but turning its knowing and absurd cultural references into ragebait.
“He is not just latching onto things his base supports, but latching on to things that he knows will anger the other side,” said Audrey Halversen, a political communication scholar at the University of Michigan. “Which then, of course, makes these posts gain a lot of attention.”
Hegseth’s use of Franklin the Turtle was likely a callback to a popular meme from a few years ago, when covers of the Franklin the Turtle books were replaced with abrasive titles like “Franklin Hides From The Police” or “Franklin Films His First Porn Video.” The juxtaposition of a gentle and innocent character with violent and aggressive actions is a trolling mechanism, said Dannagal Young, director of the Center for Political Communication at the University of Delaware, particularly when utilized by the defense secretary.
“The entire ethos and aesthetic of this administration is spectacle and subversion of norms,” Young said. “You don’t do that through deliberation or argument, but through symbols.”
While the president would repost memes back in his first term, such posts in his second term have grown and spread beyond his personal accounts onto the pages of federal agencies and their appointed secretaries, like the Department of Education, Border Patrol and the Department of Defense. Thanks to generative AI tools suddenly enabling the mass production of images and video with little effort or thought, backed up by the administration’s embrace of right-wing online influencers and a vast budget for the government’s own videographers, the executive branch now delivers a constant flood of visual slop and provocation to the public.
In February, to promote Trump’s efforts to cancel congestion pricing in Manhattan, the White House posted a fake Time magazine cover, with the Time banner reading “TRUMP” and an apparently AI-generated painting of Trump wearing a crown. On May 2, in the interval between the death of Pope Francis and the gathering of the conclave to name his successor, the president reposted AI fan art of himself dressed as pope; two days later, for May the Fourth, the White House reposted a glossy image of Trump as a muscular Jedi wielding a Sith-red lightsaber.
February 14, 2025: A Valentine’s poem from the federal government.
Along with glorifying Trump, the administration has kept up a flow of memes to deride its political opponents and critics — including memes to brag about, or mock the critics of, its own memes. In July, the White House X account posted an image of a sign on an easel on the White House grounds, reading “oMg, diD tHe WHiTE hOuSE reALLy PosT tHiS?”, with the post itself reading, “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say we can’t post banger memes [explosion emoji].” When X briefly rolled out an account-geolocation feature in November, which seemed to identify numerous MAGA-supporting accounts as foreign-based, the White House account posted an image with its own location listed as “Rent Free in Democrats’ Heads.”
“The success of the White House’s social media pages speak for itself. Through engaging posts and banger memes, we are successfully communicating the President’s extremely popular agenda and forcing his Democrat critics to take indefensible positions,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told CNN in a statement. “There’s a reason so many people try to copy our style – our message resonates.”
From Doge to DOGE
Trump is far from the only politician to use the language of the internet for political gain. In 2020, Michael Bloomberg dropped more than $1 million to pay for influencer-created memes. In 2021, Joe Biden’s team reached out to the popular progressive-leaning political meme account Saint Hoax for potential partnership. As Biden’s attempted reelection campaign approached, a mix of anti-Biden and pro-Trump memes were fused and coopted into ironic memes of Biden as “Dark Brandon,” eyes glowing or shooting lasers, that eventually were fully adopted by Biden loyalists. By the summer of 2024, after Biden yielded to Kamala Harris, Charli XCX’s “Kamala is brat” erased whatever line had remained between online culture and political campaigning.
When Trump returned to office, though, the meme campaign became meme governance. The most drastic actions in the early weeks of the administration came not through any regular officials or preexisting government organs, but through Trump’s alliance with the meme-obsessed, round-the-clock-posting Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency — its name chosen because it shortened to DOGE.
Long ago, in internet time, “Doge” was a wholesome meme about a cute Japanese dog. Before its first year of popularity was through, Doge’s name and image had been adopted by a project meant to parody the emerging field of cryptocurrency, which swiftly became an actual multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency. Eventually, Doge became a fixation of Musk’s: first as a joke-like object he could post about and make money, and then, by January 2025, after the joke had been repeated enough, as the name of an initiative responsible for the layoff or departure of hundreds of thousands of federal employees.
The Department of Government Efficiency itself focused on posting screenshots of columns of numbers and various boasts about its accomplishments, not entirely unlike an old-fashioned agency account. And Musk barely made it five months in the government before stepping down. But his tryhard, combative internet posting spirit remained and spread.
March 27, 2025: Capitalizing on a trend that used AI to Studio Ghibli-ify photos, the White House posted this to show off an arrest of an alleged undocumented immigrant.
Shannon McGregor, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill focused on social media and political communication, said, “This is what happens when online reply guys get in the White House.”
The insult is the point
At first, the new administration’s posting leaned away from preexisting online references, in favor of AI renderings on the White House’s own chosen themes: Take the AI-generated pictures of Trump as a 1920s-esque gangster, with the acronym FAFO behind him, posted in January shortly after he strong-armed Colombia into taking deported migrants; or the March 27 post of a Studio Ghibli-style ICE agent arresting a migrant.
As the months went on, the outside references became more specific and frequent. In July, Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” was advertised with a “Bump it” commercial; that same month, the White House used stills from footage of a train hitting a bus to trumpet Trump’s ban on tuition benefits for undocumented immigrants. By the fall, the mix-and-match meme posting snowballing: the ICE arrest of an unusually short migrant rendered as an image of a viral Labubu toy; a Microsoft Paint-like image about keeping the memes coming through furlough during the government shutdown, and so on.
July 10, 2025: The White House posted these stills on Instagram from footage of a train hitting a bus to trumpet Trump’s ban on tuition benefits for undocumented immigrants.
The escalation of meme use is exemplified by the Department of Homeland Security’s Instagram account. In February and March, there were no memes — some videos featured a voiceover by Secretary Kristi Noem or were soundtracked by an unremarkable instrumental. In July, the account put up more than half a dozen meme-style posts. By December, it was posting twice as many, sometimes two a day.
This communication style extended to Trump loyalists outside the executive branch: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz posted an edited video putting sombreros on prominent Democrats trying to save health care subsidies, building on an ongoing thread of Republican officials, including Trump, editing sombreros onto politicians with whom they disagreed.
A screen shows AI-modified videos of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer that were shared on social media by President Donald Trump in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on October 1, 2025. Vice President JD Vance dismissed criticism of the posts in that day’s daily press briefing.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
The most telling moment,to McGregor, came in October, when Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself as a pilot in a fighter jet, dumping bomb-loads of feces on protesters participating in the No Kings protests. On the side of the jet were the words: “King Trump.”
“It was like, ‘Oh, my God,'” McGregor said. “It’s not trying to argue against what the protesters are saying. It’s not ignoring it. That’s peak reply guy.”
The government shutdown, mass deportations, political protests, launching missiles at civilian boats in the Caribbean with no process or warning: All of these events, in the hands of the government’s social media accounts, are flattened into material for memes. What was once a format for communal joking has become shorthand for top-down authoritarian activity. As the meme account Saint Hoax described it to CNN: “Humor as a Trojan horse for fascism.”
July 11, 2025: The White House posts an image on X making fun of those who might question its meme use and cavalier approach to messaging.
In remixing what would normally be perceived as very serious political events into just another post, the government downplays the gravity of these events, McGregor said: It’s only a joke. Why are you getting offended?
“It’s an extension of this ‘Nothing matters,’ ‘Nothing’s that serious’ attitude,” McGregor said. “Which is very much a part of very online culture, from the dawn of it until now. Seeing that amplified and reflected in actual government policies and government communication is what’s really different.”
The Trump administration’s memes look familiar, in that viewers recognize the repetitive, memetic form. But instead of an observational joke, the insult is the point, Young said. Every jab is intended to provoke.
“It’s just a display of performance of dominance, constantly,” she said. “It’s like a peacock, but its feathers are always up, and it’s always ready to attack you.”
August 4, 2025: Chasing after the online outrage about people supposedly being outraged by Sydney Sweeney American Eagle jeans campaign, the Department of Defense’s Rapid Response account created a riff about Secretary Pete Hegseth’s denim trousers.
There are seemingly no limits to this peacocking. Take the mass deportations happening around the country. On social media, the tracking of immigrants on DHS, ICE and Border Patrol pages is no longer news to be released but content to be farmed: frantically edited videos of footage ranging from slick compositions to ragged verité, meant to either elicit anger or support. Men in military gear and assault rifles tackle unsuspecting people of color, all to the tune of a catchy pop song.
Who wins the meme war?
Hardly anyone expects that political memes will change anyone’s mind by winning them over to the opposite side. Studies have found that when people are exposed to political memes, it only increases their anger — both toward opposing presidential candidates and at the broader state of the country.
The White House’s relentless memer communication style “could be an attempt to kill people’s information ecosystem with just so much slop,” Halversen said — pushing overwhelmed people to disengage from politics altogether.
October 1, 2025: As thousands of federal workers faced life without paychecks during the government shutdown, the White House Instagram account posted this graphic.
“Is that the intent behind what the Trump administration does with these types of memes? I have no idea,” Halversen said. “But is that what is likely happening? I think there’s a good case to be made.”
Trump’s abrasive style is setting the tone even outside his own movement. A notable example is Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose office has borrowed Trump’s tone as he pushes back against the administration’s actions in his state and apparently contemplates a run for president in 2028. He posts in all caps, like Trump. He posts AI-generated videos, like Trump. He memes Trump’s memes, twisting the administration’s formats back at it.
Is starting a meme-fight between political rivals the future of democracy? How does the contest for real power play out when the contestants communicate entirely in ironized poses? Trump has already denounced lawmakers whose actions he disagrees with as “punishable by death,” only to later claim he didn’t mean it.
“The only place it can go is physical violence,” Young said. “I don’t know how the messaging becomes any more extreme than it already is.”
And while anyone can fight back in a meme war, government power is not so easy to overcome. In response to their songs being used in immigration raid videos, both Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter publicly spoke out against the government, with the latter calling it “evil and disgusting.”
The White House tried to clap back at Carpenter, referencing her own song with, “Anyone who would defend these sick monsters must be stupid, or is it slow?”
Both aesthetically and by the internet’s usual metrics, Carpenter won the exchange. Her response was liked almost 2 million times, and although the video remains on TikTok, the White House deleted it on X.
The mass deportations, however, continue.
