“The memes will continue”: A fake presidency, but real tyranny
This past week, the Trump White House posted an image on social media that appeared to show Nekima Levy Armstrong, a lawyer who was arrested after an anti-ICE demonstration in Minnesota, weeping helplessly after being handcuffed. It was a blatant fake. Only minutes earlier, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem had posted the original photo of Armstrong’s arrest, in which she appears calm, even resolute.
After the New York Times confronted White House officials with evidence that the second image had been “digitally altered,” probably using a generative AI tool such as Gemini or Grok, deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr responded with a post on X: “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.” You could almost hear the high-fives being exchanged; you could almost smell the medium-high-end hair products and lily of the valley-scented body spray.
That extraordinary statement says, or reveals, much more than it intends to, and even amid the relentless onslaught of lies, abuses, perversions of justice and outright criminality perpetrated by the Trump regime, it merits closer attention. The memes will continue. That should be the official motto of this relentlessly fake but genuinely terrifying presidency, holographically emblazoned in the air above the half-demolished White House, in the same Hilton Garden Inn-style typeface now used to identify the Oval Office.
It’s hardly news that Donald Trump and his MAGA devotees delight in trolling their perceived enemies with juvenile mockery and undisguised racist or sexist insults. (My colleague Amanda Marcotte made this point in her book “Troll Nation,” published a year into Trump’s first term.) But Dorr’s riposte goes further than that: Creating “memes” is a core value and policy goal of this administration, equivalent in status to the so-called enforcement of the so-called law.
If that sounds nonsensical on the surface, it’s important to understand that for the MAGA imagination and the MAGA understanding of reality, those things are not categorically different, and indeed serve to mutually reinforce each other. Trumpian social media memes tend to be embarrassingly literal masturbatory fantasies, aimed at humiliating and “triggering” opponents and even more so at gratifying the basest impulses of true believers: “King Trump” dumping an enormous payload of liquefied feces on protesters (where did the president get all that poop?); Gaza transformed into an Arab-free Eden, built around a glorious, if improbably slender, golden Trump statue.
But the “law” supposedly being enforced by Trump’s brutal, clownish and cowardly thugs in Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities to come is just as egregiously fake as last week’s image of an AI-slop Trump planting an AI-slop flag in an AI-slop Greenland. The damage being inflicted on human lives and American communities is all too real, of course, and the Kristallnacht-style terror now directed against all perceived or suspected immigrants (and against Black and brown people in general) is an important policy goal in itself.
The “law” supposedly being enforced by Trump’s clownish and cowardly thugs in Minneapolis and elsewhere is just as egregiously fake as last week’s image of an AI-slop Trump planting an AI-slop flag in an AI-slop Greenland.
By now it’s become clear that content creation — feeding the beast, in an all-too-literal sense — is a principal driving force behind all this Nazi-cosplay street theater. The memes will continue, as indeed they must: Over and over again, we see ICE officers stage unnecessary confrontations, smashing car windows or pepper-spraying unarmed demonstrators in front of liberal observers and camera crews.
Viral videos and meme-worthy images, whether they thrill the loyalists or outrage the libtards or both at once, are not byproducts of these blue-city occupations. They are not incidental to this moment of fascist terror but among its most significant instruments. They are deliberate injections of ideological poison meant to sow division, spread misinformation and render the truth valueless or irrelevant.
While the killing of Renee Good was presumably not scripted in advance, and has created significant messaging problems for the administration and its allies, it cannot really be called an accident. Something like that was almost certain to happen amid the overcharged atmosphere of the Minneapolis streets, and was made even more likely by the climate of meme-fueled unreality that reduced Good and her killer to clashing, two-dimensional stereotypes: Liberal Lesbian versus Lardass Patriot; whose side are you on? We’ve all spent enough time on social media to understand that the demand for greater engagement and more extreme content eventually leads to grotesque violence, whether it’s real or imagined or in that nebulous zone of the internet where nobody knows for sure.
That gets us closer to the tormented crux of the matter: Hateful and stupid social media memes can serve to justify or excuse despicable acts of political violence. Just as important, they also serve to conceal them, as in the “King Trump” video, beneath an unstoppable downpour of crap. When millions of people have persuaded themselves that elementary-school shootings are staged by “crisis actors,” the Jan. 6 insurrection was an FBI false-flag operation and the COVID pandemic was the work of a vast global conspiracy, the distinction between verifiable real-world information — an imperfect standard, but in my profession, the only one we’ve got — and paranoid or narcissistic delusion has become unsustainable.
When millions of people have persuaded themselves that elementary-school shootings are staged by “crisis actors” and the Jan. 6 insurrection was an FBI false-flag operation, the distinction between verifiable real-world information — in my profession, the only standard we’ve got — and paranoid delusion has become unsustainable.
Whether the faked White House photo of Nekina Levy Armstrong was genuinely meant to fool anyone is, I think, beside the point. No doubt some credulous viewers were eager to believe that a Black woman who dared to stand up against the Trump regime had been publicly humiliated and reduced to tears. Certainly they wished she had; to coin a phrase, the cruelty is the point, along with the obvious racism and misogyny. (Has Donald Trump ever mentioned a Black woman without calling her “nasty”?)
Depicting a stoical opponent of the regime blubbering in terror is pure wish fulfillment, an infantile revenge fantasy not much different from depicting Trump literally defecating on “No Kings” protesters from the sky. The chilling but unavoidable follow-on conclusion is that for hardcore MAGA cultists trapped in the distorted universe of Fox News and right-wing social media, there’s not much difference between AI-slop revenge fantasies and real violence inflicted on real people in real places.
In that universe, Renee Good has been transformed from a Minneapolis mom standing up for her neighbors into a pronoun-wielding gender terrorist, an anti-American un-person. Who is to say that she wasn’t an “outside agitator” paid by George Soros, or that she actually lived and actually died?
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To the extent that the second Trump administration possesses a political philosophy, it amounts to an interlocking or overlapping set of memes, pithy-sounding fictions and fantasies that promise (or threaten) the reversal or destruction of almost every aspect of 21st-century reality.
Immigration and racial diversity will be undone; women will return to the kitchen (in pleasant patterned skirts) and LGBTQ people will return to the closet. Big Coal and Big Oil will return to dominance, in defiance of the real-life verdict of the capitalist market. Europe will be disunited, ethnically cleansed and brought to heel as an American vassal. The global clock will miraculously be turned back, as in a bad time-travel movie, to the glory days of the imperialist “great game.” We will all (depending on who “we” are) wear nice suits and sweater sets for air travel. The flight attendant — sorry, the stewardess — will bring us a watery cup of Folgers coffee. Our wood-paneled station wagon will be waiting at the other end.
I’m not sure any of that is meant to be convincing. It’s the blatantly fake ideological wrapping of a crumbling regime built around a rapidly failing con man. His only actionable agenda is nihilistic rage, acted out as a brutal but incompetent reign of terror directed at his own people. Trump’s version of fascism barely made it off the couch, and is still more comfortable there. Its vision of the past is imaginary and it has no future, but its destructive energy has changed the world.
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from Andrew O’Hehir