Somewhere in the bowels of Washington’s 3801 Nebraska Avenue, a teenage boy is snickering as he posts ragebait on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security. At least, that’s what you’d gather from the torrent of meme-based agitprop coming out of the government’s official X accounts since Trump’s second-term crackdown on immigration began. Whoever this chief memelord is, I can only assume he’s being lavished in bonuses in the form of vapes and Robux — for he has truly outdone himself. Winning laughs from one half of the American public and outrage from the other was exactly his brief. It’s working like a dream.
Let’s look at some of his top hits. There was the video that used the song “Ice Ice Baby” over clips of 72 ICE arrests at a “nightclub run by the cartel”, in Charleston in June. There was an AI-generated Studio Ghibli-style animated image of a Dominican woman being arrested. A real photo of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a fentanyl dealer, weeping in a car park was posted on social media after her arrest in March for re-entering the US (ICE first removed her in 2020); the picture went viral, then salt was trowelled into the wound when the official White House X account posted the Ghiblified update. “You’re sociopaths and you belong in prison,” read the top comment. Kaelan Dorr, a neckbeard on the comms team, said: “The arrests will continue. The memes will continue.”
Then, in August, the Department of Homeland Security’s X account upped the ante. Uncle Sam, scratching his head, hesitates at a crossroads signposted with the phrases “cultural decline”, “homeland”, “service”, “invasion” and “opportunity”. In his hand, a broken section: “law and order.” The caption read: “Which way, American man?” For those uninitiated in the lore of ultraconservative “poasters” — by which I mean most of the public — the meme referenced another, “Which way, Western man?”, which in turn referenced a book of the same name by the white supremacist William Gayley Simpson. Published in 1978, the 1,000-page tome condemned a supposed Jewish ploy to destroy the West with the malicious forces of feminism and multiculturalism. Simpson’s solution was Hitler’s — violence against and expulsion of Jews, “Enemy No. 1”. When asked by NPR whether the post was directly referring to the book, a core text of American extremism, a DHS spokeswoman called Tricia McLaughlin said “calling everything you dislike Nazi propaganda is tiresome”.
The White House’s ragebait strategy is a luxuriant expression of power, a single protracted snort against hand-wringing critics of border enforcement. The message is this: not only can no one stop us deporting people, but they can no longer shame us for laughing about it. The civilised sombreness of the Left’s immigration conversation, in which the rights of and compassion for entrants are so often prioritised over those of citizens as a matter of moral superiority, has been torpedoed by the admission that we, the elected American government, no longer care if you think we’re mean.
“The message is this: not only can no one stop us deporting people, but they can no longer shame us for laughing about it.”
Criticism only sweetens the iconoclasm: in July, the White House’s X account earned the opprobrium of the cultural landmark that is Jess Glynne — a British singer whose two popular songs are best known for featuring in adverts — for using her song “Hold My Hand” over a video of ICE deportations with the slogan “Nothing beats a Jet 2 holiday”. Glynne felt “sick”, she said, adding that her music was “about love, unity and spreading positivity — never about division or hate”. Lib, owned. Olivia Rodrigo found herself in a similar bind last month, and responded by calling the DHS “racist” and “hateful”. Then this month, the White House poked a new bear in the form of the Gen Z songstress Sabrina Carpenter, who criticised ICE’s “inhumane agenda” when they used her song “Juno” in a deportation video. On Friday, more like an infuriating little brother than an official government social media account, the White House doubled down — editing a clip from Carpenter’s appearance on Saturday Night Live to make her appear to call a Hispanic comedian “illegal”.
Offence is the point. So are the inevitable newspaper quotes from the immigration lobby: Angelica Salas, head of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, complained that “the memes are mean”. They “create a terrorising environment for our people”, she added. “We don’t deserve this.” But as anyone who’s ever known a school bully will recall, appealing to their kindness means you’ve lost the argument. The Trump administration has the liberals hanging by their ankles in a bathroom stall, hair tickling the toilet bowl. To have them beg for mercy is the aim.
It is difficult to imagine any other American administration, or the government of any other country, being quite so brazen. We are in an era of extreme, swaggering Trumpian confidence where the only constraint on enforcement seems to be time itself. Sensitivity, as well as practical concerns like funding, now seem very remote. Compare this with Britain’s Labour government, whose lurch to the right on immigration under the unexpectedly competent home secretary Shabana Mahmood comes not from the conviction of this Fabian Cabinet but under the pressure of public resentment. As the DHS urges Americans to “remember your homeland’s heritage” above a painting of a young couple cradling an infant in a prairie schooner, the British government struggles to get deportation flights even to take off. Trump’s National Security Strategy, released last week, warns that mass migration and declining birth rates present Europe with “the stark prospect of civilisational erasure”. The document was meant to invigorate like-minded “patriotic” parties across the continent, but short of a Reform election sweep it is hard to imagine mainstream parties in Britain using such grand language. Conversely, the edgelordism of Right-wing meme culture has already found a footing on British X, where grotesque racialised Wojaks abound. If Reform cribbed from the White House’s meme machine, it would find fertile ground in the UK.
This administration’s philosophy of migration is so potent because it combines supreme earnestness with total insincerity. Irony has allowed official government agencies to say the unsayable under the cloak of plausible deniability. This has been the method since the beginning of this term when, in February, the White House posted a video titled “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight” featuring audio of clinking chains and boots trudging up tinny airplane steps. Amid the din of horror from X’s normies was the real prize: the approval of the terminally online edgelords — the Fuentes loyalists, the remote nihilists — areas of the alt-Right Trump must be keen to shore up. One posted a picture of Patrick Bateman in a Maga hat savouring music on his headphones; another wrote: “Gonna play this on a loop tonight when I go to sleep.”
“The average Democrat politician doesn’t understand why this makes us all feel good, hence why they’ll keep losing,” wrote a third. This last commenter was entirely right: these posts are about feeling good, feeling so confident in the morality and effectiveness of your policy that you go online to brag about it. These posts will be remembered by future generations as a victory lap from a corner of the West surrounded by broken and unconfident allies, governments — including Britain’s own — pathologically apologetic about having to involve themselves in the dirty work of enforcing borders. Taking paint-stripper to the veneer of politesse surrounding immigration policy does make many voters feel good: much of middle America is enjoying being a spectator in Trump’s theatre of cruelty, delighted that for once they “got what they voted for” — one of the resounding phrases of this second term. These memes may be undignified, “mean”, tasteless — but that is the point. The Boomer mainstream has been quietly initiated in the language of the terminally online, supping on the in-jokes and relishing its risky allusions. The era of “being kind”, it seems, is well and truly over. In its stead arrives something stranger, crawling out the gutter of 2010s forum culture — an unprecedented irreverence that no longer cares what the grown-ups think.
