The Troll-in-Chief: When the White House Becomes a Weaponized Meme Account

How official government social media is now a platform for dehumanization, disinformation, and stochastic terror with a paint palette emoji on top.

It’s one thing for extremists on fringe message boards to dehumanize immigrants. It’s another when the United States government does it, with the full weight of its institutions, the seal of Homeland Security, and the endorsement of the President himself. Over the past 24 hours, the official White House X account has reposted a trio of messages that would’ve once been unthinkable in American political discourse. They are vulgar, propagandistic, and laced with stochastic menace. More than just poor taste, they reflect a government actively inciting division and violence while wrapping its intentions in memes and muscle.

In one post, Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt attacks The New York Times for not labeling a subway rape suspect as an “ILLEGAL alien.” Homeland Security follows by circulating a doctored version of the Times headline, swapping “Brooklyn man” for “Monster” and “Illegal Alien” in blood-red text, as if scrawled by an angry teenager rather than the agency tasked with protecting the nation. The message is unmistakable: don’t see a human being, see a category, see a threat. This is scapegoating by decree.

Then, as if to bathe the whole performance in myth, the White House celebrates May the 4th with an AI-generated image of Donald Trump as a jacked, lightsaber-wielding Jedi warlord, standing before a curtain of American flags and bald eagles, bare arms bulging like a Marvel villain. The caption is pure projection: “You’re not the Rebellion, you’re the Empire,” it sneers at critics. But the real Empire is the one rewriting headlines, demonizing immigrants, and radicalizing its base from the seat of power. The real Empire is the one turning fascism into fandom.

This is not just propaganda, it is stochastic terrorism delivered through official channels. When a government elevates dehumanization to policy, when it trades accountability for performance art, it signals not only who it sees as disposable, but who it wants its followers to fear, and maybe one day, to attack. These posts aren’t fringe; they are state-sponsored and they demand a reckoning.

If the White House’s dehumanizing language around immigration weren’t disturbing enough, its treatment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia takes things even further: it is not just incitement, it is targeted character assassination, carried out by the executive branch against a single person. And worse still, it’s being done in direct defiance of a federal court order.

On May 3rd, the official White House account posted a grotesque parody: an Obama-style poster of Abrego Garcia’s face, edited into a propaganda meme bearing the words “MS-13” in bold and the tagline “Not a Maryland Dad.” The caption reads, “Ah yes, a true classic. We call this one… ‘Not a Maryland Dad’” with a paint palette emoji, as if mocking a man’s legal plight were an art project. This is an actual public statement from the executive branch of the U.S. government.

The image is accompanied by a text post labeling Abrego Garcia as an “MS-13 gang member, illegal alien from El Salvador, and suspected human trafficker,” citing DHS. But that framing omits a few minor details, like the fact that he was deported while his appeal was pending in federal court. Or that Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland’s U.S. District Court issued a ruling calling the deportation unlawful, a violation of due process that may entitle him to return.

The administration knows this. They know he has not been convicted of human trafficking or gang affiliation. They know the court ruled in his favor. And still, they’ve chosen to wage a public smear campaign, branding him with criminality and broadcasting it to millions of followers with all the design tropes of a political attack ad. The point isn’t evidence, it’s impact.

This is how authoritarian regimes operate: they conflate accusation with proof, erase legal nuance with visual simplicity, and destroy a person’s reputation to delegitimize the laws that protect them. The use of the Obama-styled visual is no accident either, it’s a dog whistle to the MAGA base, a reminder that their grievances are still rooted in the symbolic undoing of Obama’s legacy, now projected onto a Salvadoran man they want the public to fear.