President Donald Trump’s administration is posting sadistic memes on its social media accounts to prompt the public to cruelly laugh at migrants caught up in his mass deportation obsession. For example, last week, the White House X account exploited a new ChatGPT feature that allows users to transform images “into the style of Studio Ghibli,” the beloved animation studio, and posted a cartoon version of a posted photo of a crying undocumented migrant in handcuffs. The responses to the post were a mix of delight from supporters and horror from critics, and the practice illustrates how Trump knows he must dehumanize migrants to justify his aggressive and increasingly extralegal efforts to deport them.
Trump couches his messages in seemingly unserious or “comical” aesthetics online to downplay how sinister they are. As I’ve written in the past, Trump uses humor as a weapon, in part by dressing up his violations of norms and degradation of his opponents as a joke.
The White House chose an unsympathetic subject for its Studio Ghibli-style meme — a migrant who reportedly had been deported in the past after pleading guilty to attempted possession with intent to distribute fentanyl. But regardless of what that person did or where one stands on this particular deportation or deportations in general — brandishing people’s pain as a political message is not a defense of policy. Trump’s propaganda reveals that he delights in the pain of others, and he encourages the public to laugh with him.
Trump’s social media team is making performative sadism a full-fledged comms strategy. In February the White House posted a video of migrants being deported with the text “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight." The “joke” is that the viewer is supposed to find it soothing to hear the sounds of the jangling of handcuffs and chains on migrants and the starting rumble of the plane that will deport them. On Feb. 14, above an image that looked like a valentine with Trump’s and White House border czar Tom Homan’s heads surrounded by hearts, Trump posted, “Roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally, and we’ll deport you,”
Trump’s friends have struck similar notes. El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele created a disturbing three-minute propaganda video, which he released after Trump initially deported alleged Venezuelan gang members to a brutal prison in his country. Operating in a similar emotional register as Trump’s memes, Bukele’s video depicts the brutalization of prisoners as part of an exciting action sequence and revels in an authoritarian aesthetic in its depiction of phalanxes of police officers. It’s easy to see why Trump and Bukele are natural partners on this issue. Each of them takes pleasure in seeing others publicly humiliated.
Trump’s propaganda, which glories in the derision of those he terms “monsters,” is meant to help culturally authorize the extreme and potentially illegal measures he’s taking to deport them. The Trump administration is using flimsy evidence, circumventing due process and exploiting obscure provisions of immigration law to expel as many people as the administration considers socially or politically undesirable as possible. There’s a parallel track between, in the cultural sphere, treating migrants as not fully human and deserving of our derisive laughter and, as official policy, treating them as a class of people who have no rights.
