The Trump White House is government by meme

On Monday morning, the nation awoke to learn that 100 “Wanted”-style posters now line the driveway to the White House, featuring faces of people the Trump administration has deported and the crimes they’d committed. A perpetual shriek, warning about the rise of fascism, arose from the online cosmos, as people began posting, again, “This is how it starts.” I saw more than one person compare the display to a medieval king posting heads on spikes around a moat, or Nazi propaganda magazine spreads about dangerous “Juden.”

Perhaps. Or maybe it was just oppositional troll-bait. This is how the Trump White House operates. It’s government by meme, and it can be very effective. MSNBC was quickly on air displaying the posters, running down the row slowly and somberly as though they were visiting the Vietnam memorial, taking great care to blur out the faces of the recently deported. And with that, the mouse had eaten the cheese.

The Trump administration is hardly some immortal, unopposable force. Half the American population would hate the President even if he made free Bitcoin rain down from digital heaven. Even the most Trump-generous polls show that people are worried about the economy and find his tariff policies dangerous and confusing. There are vulnerabilities.

But Trump is decidedly not vulnerable on immigration, where he’s stood fast on his campaign promise to seal the border, remove illegal aliens with dangerous criminal records and mass-deport other illegals as well. Regional judges and human-rights advocates are screaming for him to stop, but he has a full green light from his base. They voted for him to do this, and, in many cases, only this.

The administration is fully aware that it’s operating from a position of strength on the immigration issue. Its opposition, on the other hand, isn’t. You have Democratic representatives flying down to El Salvador, on the taxpayer’s dime, getting snagged in ludicrous photo ops and making ridiculous speeches, while the government rolls out criminal records of people who would have given Pablo Escobar moral pause. It’s like an endless replication of the AOC-crying-at-the-border photo op, but not nearly as stylish.

So when the administration starts off Monday with a Tom Homan “we’ve sealed the border” press conference, accompanied by an outrageous wall of shame, it’s absolutely inviting the media to attach itself to the Flypaper of the Week. If the media intentionally blurs the faces of accused criminals, it may think it’s behaving ethically, but it’s really just falling into the Trump Meme trap. What they consider speaking truth to power is really just a stylized Instagram background for the perpetually gaslit.

At Monday’s major White House presser announcing a full-court administration press against sanctuary cities, border czar Homan stood up against a media fusillade, saying, “There’s a lot of people in this country that don’t like me. I don’t care… People always want to say, why are you so emotional? Because if they wore my shoes for 40 years, they’d understand why I’m emotional…I’ve talked to little girls as young as nine years old that are raped multiple times by the cartel members.”

Whether you agree with the Trump administration’s immigration policies or not, that’s how they’re framing it. So by proxy, if you oppose that framing, then you’re in favor of some of the most horrific crimes imaginable. Therein lies the Meme Bait, and the media cannot resist.