On Tuesday evening, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Fulbright scholar researching children’s digital-media consumption at Tufts University, was taken into ICE custody. Ozturk was handcuffed and forced into a vehicle while on her way to dinner after fasting for Ramadan. In a video, she asks, “Can I call the police?” only to be told, “We are the police.”

Why was Rumeysa Ozturk seized like this? The Department of Homeland Security claimed that Ozturk had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization.” But it provided no further details, much less concrete evidence. Asked about her detention, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained, “If you come into the U.S. as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it.” In the absence of actual charges, Ozturk’s purported crime appears to be an op-ed she co-wrote in March 2024. The article called on Tufts to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and “divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.” A prominent pro-Israel website featuring Ozturk’s photo later provided a link to that article as evidence of her “anti-Israeli activism.”

As Americans who follow Turkish politics closely, we have spent the past two decades decrying the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey. We have pointed to repeated crackdowns on free speech, including the regular use of security forces to arrest and intimidate students. So we watched with particular horror as our own government sent masked agents to arrest a Turkish student because of her political opinions.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Trump is deporting ‘them’ in ways that threaten us]

To anyone who has watched Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in action, all of this was far too familiar. For years the Turkish government has used “support for terrorism” as a sweeping charge to justify jailing its political enemies. Crucially, this support need not involve any action or association with an actual terrorist group. More often than not, it simply involves expressing an opinion critical of Erdoğan or his government.

What made this approach so effective was that Erdoğan usually focused on marginalized or unpopular groups. Because much of the public was hostile to these groups, mainstream politicians played along. Now, after a decade, Erdoğan has been emboldened to jail his main political rival and presidential contender on the same spurious charges. Turkish citizens have rallied in protest—but it may be too late.

Pro-Kurdish journalists and activists have long been a main target of Erdoğan’s terrorism charges. For decades, the PKK, designated a terrorist group by both the U.S. and Turkey, waged a brutal insurgency against the Turkish state. The widespread hatred this conflict generated in Turkey made it easy for Erdoğan to brand anyone who sympathizes with the Kurdish cause as a terrorist. This then helped him jail individuals who called attention to civilian casualties or who protested for peace.

Kurdish politicians faced a similar fate. The former Kurdish presidential candidate and party co-leader Selahattin Demirtaş has been jailed since 2016. More than 150 Kurdish mayors have been removed during this same period. The decades of stigmatization that Kurds have experienced as an ethnic minority help explain how the government gets away with repressing them. On top of this, pro-government media outlets depict oppositional Kurds as affiliated with the PKK whether or not they actually have ties to the group.

Individuals affiliated with, or accused of being affiliated with, the Fetullah Gulen religious movement have been targeted in the same way. In 2016, some of Gulen’s followers participated in a coup against the Turkish government, generating an angry backlash among Turkish citizens. Following this, Erdogan arrested not only anyone plausibly connected to the coup but also anyone he saw fit to charge with being connected, plausibly or not, with the entire Gulen movement. People who had attended the wrong high school, put money in the wrong bank, or gone to the wrong Quran-reading course were jailed as members of the “Fethullah Gulen Terror Organization.” The government used the chance to target its political enemies. In the case of one of our colleagues, the evidence presented for his Gulenist ties was a decorative bell with the word Pennsylvania on it—a supposedly clear reference to the state in which Gulen lived.

[Henri J. Barkey: Erdoğan’s war on truth]

Then, last week, Erdoğan arrested Ekrem İmamoğlu, the popular mayor of Istanbul. İmamoğlu was reelected by a wide margin last year, and was days away from a primary election that would anoint him the presidential challenger to Erdoğan. But after numerous failed moves to disqualify him from politics, the police detained İmamoğlu on corruption and terrorism charges. He remains in jail, while his supporters are out on the street protesting this blatant subversion of democracy. Not surprisingly, Erdoğan has accused them, and their lawyers, of being terrorists as well.

The Trump administration, like Erdoğan’s government, has started its consolidation of power by going after minorities with dissenting opinions. Like Kurds or Gulenists in Turkey, Muslim and nonwhite students without citizenship make for easy targets in America. Before Ozturk, ICE targeted Columbia’s Mahmoud Khalil and Yunseo Chung in New York. The only evidence presented against them was their role in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. For too many American commentators and politicians, that was reason enough. And, in the absence of firm political and popular pushback, the number of students suffering similar treatment is growing. The University of Alabama student and Iranian national Alireza Doroudi, seized the same day as Ozturk, remains in ICE custody without a clear explanation.

In arresting his political enemies, Erdoğan counted on the support of mainstream Turks who hated the PKK and Fetullah Gulen more than they cared about the rule of law. Likewise, in arresting student activists, Trump is counting on the support of mainstream Americans who hate Hamas more than they respect the Constitution. So far, Erdoğan seems to have calculated correctly, and he has reaped the benefits. If Americans remain silent in the face of mounting detentions, they will ensure that Trump does as well.

On March 18, the official White House account on X posted two photographs of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a woman who was arrested earlier this month by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The post described her as a “previously deported alien felon convicted of fentanyl trafficking,” and celebrated her capture as a win for the administration. In one photograph, Basora-Gonzalez is shown handcuffed and weeping in a public parking lot.  

The White House account posted about Basora-Gonzalez again yesterday—this time, rendering her capture in the animated style of the beloved Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, who co-founded the animation company Studio Ghibli. Presumably, whoever runs the account had used ChatGPT, which has been going viral this week for an update to its advanced “4o” model that enables it to transform photographs in the style of popular art, among other things. The White House did not respond directly to a request for comment, instead referring me to a post by Deputy Communications Director Kaelan Dorr that says, in part, “The arrests will continue. The memes will continue.”

It’s worth pausing here: The internet has been flooded with AI-generated images in this exact Studio Ghibli style. Some people have used it for images of pets or family members. Others opted for a trollish register, leading ChatGPT to spit out cutesy renderings of JFK’s assassination, planes hitting the World Trade Center, and the torture at Abu Ghraib. On X, the prevalence of these images became an event unto itself, one in which the White House decided to participate by sharing a cartoon of a woman crying in handcuffs.

This is how the White House account operates now. In previous administrations (including much of Donald Trump’s first term), the account was used to post anodyne updates, highlight press releases, and share information about the administration. It was, to be fair, often painfully dull or written in the stilted language of a brand. Now the account exists to troll its political enemies and delight the MAGA faithful.

[Read: The internet is worse than a brainwashing machine]

On Wednesday, the account posted a picture of Vice President J. D. Vance shooting a tactical rifle, referring to the bullets he fired as “freedom seeds,” a term popular among gun YouTubers. When Google Maps adopted the “Gulf of America” language pushed by the administration, the White House account celebrated by sharing a video in which the words Gulf of Mexico are wiped off the globe. In February, it posted an AI-generated picture of Trump as an American monarch, wearing a crown. The image’s caption reads, “Long live the king.” After the disastrous Oval Office ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the account posted a photo of Vance staring at Zelensky with the caption “Have you said thank you once?” Although the account sometimes shares actual news, it’s frequently preoccupied by rapid-response engagement bait for MAGA diehards. Less information, more content. The intent is not to inform but to go viral.

Beyond the fact that this kind of shitposting is so obviously beneath the office, the posts are genuinely sinister. By adding a photo of an ICE arrest to a light-hearted viral trend, for instance, the White House account manages to perfectly capture the sociopathic, fascistic tone of ironic detachment and glee of the internet’s darkest corners and most malignant trolls. The official X account of the White House isn’t just full of low-rent 4chan musings, it’s an alarming signal of an administration that’s fluent in internet extremism and seemingly dedicated to pursuing its casual cruelty as a chief political export.

To be clear, the actions of the second Trump administration—the dismantling of the federal government via DOGE, the apprehension and detainment of immigrants and green-card holders with seemingly no due process—are of far more consequence than what it posts on social media. But White House posts are not random missives either: They’re official government communications from the executive branch, sent out to 1.4 million followers, to say nothing of whatever additional reach these posts receive via algorithmic recommendation and ad hoc sharing.

The account’s true obsession is immigration: @WhiteHouse has posted dozens of mugshots of immigrants arrested by ICE. Each one lists an offense they’ve been arrested for in big block letters, and usually the catchphrase “MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN” is appended. Earlier this month, after the Department of Homeland Security commented on the deportation of a Lebanese professor at Brown University—a violation of a court order temporarily protecting her from expulsion—the White House account responded by posting a photo of Trump waving goodbye from a McDonald’s drive-through window. (The picture was taken during a 2024 campaign stunt.) On Valentine’s Day, the account wrote, “Roses are red / Violets are blue / Come here illegally / And we’ll deport you.”

And in an infamous example, on February 18, the White House account posted a 41-second video of faceless men being shackled and marched onto planes. The post’s caption read, “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” (ASMR is short for “autonomous sensory meridian response,” or the titillating sensation caused by certain noises, such as whispering, tapping, or crinkling; videos of people making such noises are enormously popular across social media.) The subtext of the White House post is far from subtle and is reminiscent of something out of 4chan’s notoriously bigoted politics message board: Watching allegedly undocumented immigrants bound in chains is a pleasurable, even sensual experience. Like any trolling post, it’s meant to be simultaneously taken seriously and played off as a dumb online joke. Even those inside the Trump administration seemed taken aback by the audacity of the post. Even some MAGA supporters appeared uncomfortable by @WhiteHouse’s brazenness. “If you guys could stick with the grim shock and awe, and leave the edgy gloating to those of us who don’t work in the White House I think that would probably be better for optics,” one user wrote on X. The “ASMR” deportation video, as of this writing, has been viewed almost 104 million times on X.

Exactly who is running the White House X account is an object of fascination for close observers. Some accounts fantasize that Trump’s college-age son, Barron, is running it. Those outside of Trump fandom have insisted that it is being run by edgelords—one post referred to the operator as an “incel reddit user.” One Bluesky user described the account as “lowkey goebbelsmaxxing,” a reference to the Nazi propagandist. (The White House did not respond to a request to identify who writes the account’s posts.) What all the speculation suggests is that at least someone with access to the account is intimately familiar with far-right internet spaces and culture, specifically Groypers, a term for the loose online movement that has succeeded the alt-right. Earlier this year, the writer John Ganz argued that “Groyperism totally suffuses the cultural environment of the right.” He and others have suggested that the culture is present in the offices of Republican representatives in Washington, D.C., including in the White House. (A Trump staffer was fired in the first administration for associating with white nationalists; he’s now back, in a role at the State Department.) Although the identities of whoever is running the account are, at present, unknown, what’s clear is that their output appears to delight prominent extremists online. The message coming from the account, to borrow language from one far-right X user, is clear: The posters are in control.

[Read: X is a white-supremacist site]

And the posters have goals. The first is to engage and supply their loyal audiences with constant memes and content. The second is perhaps more strategic. The account’s blatant humiliation of immigrants who it alleges have heinous criminal records is intentional. The goal is to goad their opponents into defending people accused of indefensible crimes. The primary accusation from the MAGA faithful toward people who are outraged about the White House’s Studio Ghibli post or the ASMR video is that the left is more concerned with defending fentanyl dealers and immigrants accused of rape and robbery than they are about the safety of the country. “Disappointing that folks are more upset about this meme than they are about the fentanyl crisis,” Dorr said in the same post that the White House pointed me to. But this is a false binary; in all cases, the chief objections are to the dehumanization and glee on display and the worrying lack of due process.

The White House is after something more than just shock value. It’s propaganda, and Trump’s allies are learning the playbook. This week, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted a video on X from a prison in El Salvador where deported immigrants are being held. Behind Noem are dozens of men in one jail cell, many shirtless with tattoos; their heads have all been shaved during intake. The prisoners are props, a backdrop for Noem’s message of intimidation to undocumented immigrants: “If you do not leave, we will hunt you down, arrest you, and you could end up in this El Salvadorian prison.” Like the ASMR post or the Ghibli cartoon, the implication is that these deportees are utterly undeserving of any shred of human dignity. There are many other examples, such as FBI Director Kash Patel’s recent posts, one of which features him walking around in camouflage, set to rock music, as FBI agents blow open doors with explosives. Taken together, the posts offer a bracing but useful insight into how the administration sees itself, and the message of casual cruelty and overwhelming force it wants to project to the rest of the world.

That this administration should fully embrace the tactics and aesthetics of online far-right extremists and technological tools like generative AI to further its message makes perfect sense. These are reliable ways to increase engagement, gain attention, and illustrate a precise vision of the future they want to usher in. Even so, the account is chilling. Those who’ve spent enough time in the online spaces that have clearly influenced this administration—or at least whoever runs its social accounts—know how this goes. This is a game of accelerationism and nihilism, using tools and platforms that excel at depersonalizing, thus rendering empathy for others ever more difficult. That this sociopathic posting style is coming out of this administration—that it has been so thoroughly mainstreamed by the right—suggests that the cultural architecture of the internet has changed. There is still a fever swamp, but now the White House sits on top of it.