Berliner Tageblatt - Meme politics: White House embraces aggressive alt-right online culture

Recently, the account posted about the arrest of a weeping, handcuffed alleged felon before her deportation by depicting her likeness in the AI-generated Ghibli style that has flooded the internet, giving the image of her sobbing an animated aesthetic.

Not long prior, the account posted a video of shackled deportees set to the tune of "Closing Time," the 90's-era Semisonic hit.

"I think it sums up our immigration policy pretty well: 'You don't have to go home but you can't stay here,'" said Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, quoting the lyrics with a smile as she defended the message, which Semisonic immediately denounced.

And then there was the Valentine's Day post: "Roses are Red / Violets are Blue / Come Here Illegally / And We'll Deport You" read a card featuring the floating heads of President Donald Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan.

For Marcus Maloney, a sociology professor at Coventry University, it is a social media strategy that speaks to "the 4Chanification of American politics."

An image-based online forum that has become a hub of disinformation, 4Chan was an early home of "shitposting," a brand of internet communication intended to shock, offend or muddle discourse with absurdity.

And if Trump 1.0 embraced the 2016-era alt-right "shitposters" who bolstered his candidacy, Trump 2.0 is incorporating their methods into official communication channels.

It is a new tactic on an account that not long ago, even in the Republican president's first term, featured a stream of press releases and relatively innocuous statements.

Responding to online outrage over the Ghibli portrayal of a deportation arrest, White House communications official Kaelan Dorr re-posted the image, vowing that "the arrests will continue. The memes will continue."

"They're leaning pretty heavily into meme culture and to chronically online individuals," said Jacob Neiheisel, a political science professor at the University of Buffalo.

"That's where a lot of the energy in the MAGA movement is."

- Offensive 'outsider' -

Trump presented himself as the iconoclastic opposite of the more polished Democrats when he won his first term.

By the time he won his second, "the gloves were really off in terms of his communication style -- and people really responded to that," Maloney said, adding that the offensiveness can actually come off as more "authentic."

"That offensiveness signals a kind of outsider status," he continued, "even though we're talking about a guy who's a billionaire."

The trolling now adopted by the White House is meant to simultaneously shock and be brushed off as a joke, the genre of "locker room talk" that has been a through-line of Trump's non-consecutive presidencies.

The former reality TV star has brought that genre's energy to governing, firing off frenetic statements that often denigrate his opponents and apply crass labels to them.

This style appeals to people already fluent in trolling, particularly younger males, Neiheisel said: "It's funny for them. It's entertainment."

- Demeaning and trivializing -

Another of the White House's infamous posts likened images and sounds of shackled people boarding a deportation plane to ASMR, the auditory-sensory phenomenon that sees people find relaxation or pleasure in certain sounds.

The flippant language "hurts, ultimately, the gravitas of the presidency -- the world's most powerful office -- and it hurts the perception of it not only domestically but internationally," said Mark Hass, a digital marketing expert and strategic communication professor at Arizona State University.

"It trivializes" important issues like immigration and demeans people, Hass said.

And it can represent an insidious reflection of the Trump administration's political aims, Maloney said. That callousness can open the door to policies that dehumanize or render vulnerable minority groups, he added.

"It's a nihilism in respect specifically to how things are communicated," he said.

"In terms of what they're actually doing," he said, it's "a mainstreaming of far-right dream policies."

E.Schubert--BTB