White House Social Media Strategy: Memes, AI, and Controversy in Trump's Second Term

The White House official social media account is a total cringe fest -- and it's gaining a following

When then-former president Donald Trump introduced a line of NFTs in December 2022, he was widely mocked for it. The digital trading cards alternately depicted Trump as a muscle-bound superhero, a cowboy, and an astronaut -- like some antiquated fever dream of inspirational masculinity. Coming so soon after a stinging midterm election, in which nearly as many Trump-backed candidates in competitive races lost as those who won, it seemed like a desperate, cringy cash grab from a political supernova, mid-explosion. All the ridicule around Trump's stratospheric self-image, however, turned out to be a blip. Crucially, the NFTs sold out in less than 24 hours, raising an estimated $4.4 million, and like seemingly every obstacle in Trump's charmed political career, he incurred no lasting damage from the episode. Now that Trump has resumed his presidency, his White House has apparently internalized this lesson. Its official X account now regularly blasts out similarly cringy portraiture, culminating over the weekend in AI-assisted images of Trump as the next pope and a shredded Sith Lord from Star Wars. Government channels are reaching uncharted levels of embarrassment, having ratcheted up the 4chan factor both to emphasize Trump's world-beating dominance and communicate official policy. And they may just be getting warmed up. Ever since the inauguration in January, the White House's X account has served up a cosmic gumbo of horn-tooting and antagonistic trolling. Reflecting the president's relentless command of the attention economy, it often retweets various characters from the Trump Cinematic Universe -- JD Vance, Elon Musk, and Kristi Noem, for instance -- in between provocative posts designed to reach maximum eyeballs. The account codified its house style for the latter early on with an exhibition of mirthful hostility. Viral entries in this genre included an "ASMR" video about deportations, a Valentine's Day card about deportations, and a Studio Ghibli-style AI rendering of, well, more deportations. Last weekend, however, the account went into overdrive. Beyond the AI rendering of Pope Trump, in the wake of Pope Francis's recent death, and the May the Fourth-timed image of the president wielding a red lightsaber, there were similar posts celebrating the ostensible defunding of PBS and NPR, several posts mocking the groundswell of support for mistakenly imprisoned immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, some celebrating Trump's attacks on DEI, and a 46-hour video entitled "Lo-Fi MAGA Video to Relax/Study To," slowly listing Trump's accomplishments next to a cartoon-Trump writing from the Resolute Desk. (The use of the word "study" in that title suggests which age group this account is tweeting for.)

Trump's social media team gets aggressive with memes, AI

The traditionally staid and formal official White House social media accounts have under the second Trump administration become a fertile ground for memes, images generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and other unorthodox ways to tweak opponents and promote the president's agenda. There was the Valentine's Day post that offered a deportation-focused twist on a "roses are red" poem. There was a 15-minute video streamed on a loop that featured an animated image of President Trump signing papers in the Oval Office accompanied by "lo-fi" music to tout the administration's first 100 days. And there was a "Star Wars" themed post on May 4 that featured an AI-created image of a muscular Trump wielding a red lightsaber and a caption describing his opponents as "the Empire." Each of those posts has gone viral or captured the attention of both the president's supporters and his critics. Some of the posts, such as one referencing a viral debate about whether 100 men or one gorilla would win in a fight, have tapped into an internet phenomenon of the moment. Critics have rolled their eyes and pushed back at some of the content, arguing it is inappropriate coming from an official government account or that it trivializes serious issues. But all of the posts serve a purpose of driving a message, according to administration officials. "I would describe this team as the department of offense," White House deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr told The Hill in an interview. "We view the role of our digital outreach to obviously not only communicate effectively and transparently what the administration is doing on behalf of the American people, but it's also a very critical component of how much we keep the foot on the gas and how much we stay on offense," Dorr added. Administration officials said it is a relatively small team of roughly a dozen people that handles its social media presence. That group works on the main White House social media accounts, as well as a rapid response account that quickly shares comments from Trump and other administration officials or potentially damaging remarks from Democrats. One administration official described it as a "collaborative environment" with a streamlined process for posting that doesn't require approval from layers of senior aides. That allows the accounts to quickly seize on a viral moment or try something new that might be attention-grabbing based on the news cycle. The official White House account last week shared an image of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man living in Maryland who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador and whose case has become a flash point in the debate over Trump's deportation efforts, edited to resemble the "Hope" posters from the 2008 Obama campaign. The image read "MS-13," a reference to Abrego Garcia's alleged gang ties. Seizing on a recent internet debate over whether 100 men or one gorilla would win in a fight, the White House account shared an image that read "142,000+ deported aliens vs. 1 President Trump," tying the viral discussion back to the administration's immigration crackdown. Then there was the AI-generated image of Trump dressed as the pope, which originated in a post on the president's Truth Social account and was later shared on official White House social media channels. The image was posted less than two weeks after Pope Francis's death and just days before cardinals gather at the Vatican to elect a new Catholic leader. Multiple Catholic officials, including New York's Cardinal Timothy Dolan, pushed back on the post as inappropriate. "Give me a break. It was just, somebody did it in fun. It's fine, have to have a little fun, don't you?" Trump told reporters Monday when asked about the pope image. The White House's more provocative social media posts are part of a broader strategy of outreach and engagement to connect with various audiences. "We're not just memeing people to death," an administration official told The Hill. In addition to memes and AI images, the White House accounts share more traditional fact sheets and video clips promoting its agenda and accomplishments. The White House has held multiple "media row" days on campus, including bringing in conservative influencers last week to get out its message around the first 100 days of Trump's second term. Trump himself has engaged with the press in more traditional ways, even as he has targeted outlets like The Associated Press and NPR. Trump sat for interviews last week alone with ABC News and NBC News, and he fields questions from members of the White House press corps on a near-daily basis. But it is the more controversial social media posts that have frequently grabbed attention and have differentiated the second Trump administration's online strategy from the president's first term in some ways. Administration officials also argued it is reflective of the type of freewheeling approach that has come to define Trump and his brand of politics. "I think a large part of why we won in November is because people realized that the opposition does not live in the same world that they do. They're not humorous, they don't seek to drive engagement or a conversation, and it's not fun," an administration official told The Hill. The official said that comes through to voters, and "I think it speaks to the real crux of, like, why November went down the way it did."