White House Makes Itself Look Stupid By Digitally Altering Arrest Photo Of Anti-ICE Protester
Here’s a question: Who is running the White House website and social media accounts?
Please tell me it’s not an adult. Please tell me the person or persons who treat the White House’s official digital spaces like they’re common 4chan threads are basement-dwelling teens with the emotional maturity of, well, our current president, and the low IQ of, well, our current president. If they’re grown-ups, they’re not well-adjusted grown-ups. Perhaps they’re emotionally stunted 40-year-olds who never got over being unpopular in high school. Or maybe they peaked in high school and have spent the years since being unreasonably upset that time machines haven’t been invented yet.
Is…Is Napoleon Dynamite’s Uncle Rico running the White House’s social media? Because when I look at the cringe attempts at trolling, and comically implausible propaganda that is commonly posted there, I can only imagine this guy is behind the keyboard:
Earlier this week, we reported that protesters in St. Paul, Minnesota, walked into Cities Church during Sunday service last weekend and chanted “ICE out” and “Renee Good” in protest of ICE and Pastor David Easterwood, who serves as the director for a local field office for ICE. On Thursday, the Trump administration announced that three protesters, including protest organizer Nekima Levy Armstrong, were arrested and charged with vague federal crimes that, by any stretch of the imagination, do not match what the protesters did. (More on that in a sec.)
But what we really need to talk about is how the White House — home of the highest government office in these United States— felt a weird, immature and transparently insecure need to digitally alter Armstrong’s expression in the moment she was arrested to make it look like she was in distress, rather than stone-faced the way she actually was when the cuffs went on.
First of all, it shouldn’t be lost on anyone that the White House went out of its way to physically demean and belittle a Black woman, simply because she’s not one of the “beautiful Black women in MAGA hats” that President Donald Trump has claimed welcomed his use of federal agents and military troops to police Black communities across the country. Instead, Armstrong is likely one of the 92% of Black women who have consistently voted against him, which is why the administration felt it had the green light to reduce and ridicule her, just as Trump has done with literally every prominent Black woman who has opposed him.
Secondly, it’s wild how Trump and his administration of repressed, MAGA bootlicking weirdoes are so lacking in self-awareness that they didn’t seem to realize that once someone decided to alter this photo, that would become the central focus of Armstrong’s story. Somebody on the White House’s social media team saw the photo of Armstrong being arrested, felt she didn’t visibly care enough about the government’s show of partisan nonsense, and felt they needed to add the fear to her face that they saw was absent — and they didn’t realize doing so made the government look weak and petty, not their target.
Now, the White House is being dragged up and down social media for a self-own by exposing its own fragility, and it’s defending the post as just a “meme.”
“YET AGAIN to the people who feel the need to reflexively defend perpetrators of heinous crimes in our country I share with you this message: Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue,” White House Deputy Communications Director Kaelan Dorr wrote on X. “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
Uh — “heinous crimes”? WTF does the Trump administration think these protesters did besides walk into a building that is open to the public and disrupt a single Sunday service? Setting aside the fact that Trump’s Department of Justice has been unsuccessful every time they’ve tried to weaponize the federal court system against the MAGA messiah’s political rivals, or anti-ICE protesters that didn’t cause any physical or otherwise serious harm to anyone, what great penalty are prosecutors really expecting here, even if they do win this case?
Yeah — this is a much-ado-about-nothing-ass case, and that’s why the administration is now absurdly and desperately trying to frame the protest as anti-Christian “persecution” and an attack on “religious freedom.”
“Our nation was settled and founded by people fleeing religious persecution,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement, the Washington Post reported. “Religious freedom is the bedrock of this country. We will protect our pastors. We will protect our churches. We will protect Americans of faith.”
MAGA America predictably became outraged — immediately spinning the protest as anti-Christian oppression — and it tried its best make journalist Don Lemon an organizer of the demonstration, when he was clearly only there to cover it.
What’s even more predictable is the Trump administration responding to the MAGA backlash by taking action it wouldn’t take if a mosque had been the staging ground for an anti-Islam protest, or if the demonstration aligned with conservative causes at all.
Also, the administration is probably just salty that a judge wouldn’t let the DOJ charge Lemon just for exercising the freedom of the press.
Anyway, back to whoever is running the White House accounts being childish, moronic, and prone to implausible propaganda.
Earlier this month, we reported on the White House’s website commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6 MAGA attack at the U.S. Capitol by completely rewriting what happened that day, blaming it on Democrats, pretending Nancy Pelosi had the power to reject Trump’s alleged offer to send in the National Guard, and completely ignoring the fact that Trump’s round-the-clock “stop the steal” propaganda is what caused the attack in the first place.
Months before that, the White House’s X account tried to get in on the “Jet Blue Holiday” trend by using it to make light of all the brown people they’re hunting down, terrorizing, and deporting.
Couple the White House’s internet shenanigans with the president’s tendency to make a fool of himself by sharing political AI videos that make him look like a toddler screaming, “NA NA BOO BOO” to other kids in the playpen, and it’s clear that the federal government is being run by idiots who are 50-plus years old, going on eight.
It’s pathetic.
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