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Ukrainian helicopter crew hailed after coming under fire during an evacuation of a military base in South Sudan.

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.

In her public appearances and on social media, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has become a symbol of fearless resistance to the Trump administration’s bullying. She has delivered defiant speeches before huge crowds. When Trump trolled her nation with his “Gulf of America” stunt, she trolled right back: At a press conference, she displayed an antique map that labeled most of the present-day United States as “Mexican America.”

Her methods have appeared to gain a measure of respect. Almost alone among U.S. allies and partners, Mexico has been spared Donald Trump’s barrage of insults and threats. Canada is mocked almost daily. The administration expresses intentions to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal Zone. The administration has also doomed hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers by shutting off vital assistance. By contrast, Trump has lavished praise on Sheinbaum, calling her “tough” and “a wonderful woman.” Vice President J. D. Vance, who urged military action against Mexico during his service in the Senate, has gone quiet.

Other American allies must be impressed and envious. What’s Sheinbaum’s secret? How is she saving her country from the Trump-Vance flex?

The answer is straightforward, but not the one that the Palacio Nacional’s social-media operation is trying to project. Contrary to appearances, the Sheinbaum secret is appeasement. The reason Mexico’s president has not been called out for her Trump-complaisance is that the country’s political opposition and independent media are too crushed to name the policy for what it is. But the evidence is in.

[David Frum: The ‘Gulf of America’ is an admission of defeat]

President Trump has made six big demands of Mexico. Sheinbaum has granted them all. Let’s proceed, one by one:

He wants much more active Mexican cooperation on immigration enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border. He wants Mexico to receive people deported from the United States, including people who are not Mexican nationals. He wants Mexico to adopt a more militarized approach to drug interdiction. He wants a new tariff regime to shift more North American manufacturing from Mexico to the United States. He wants Mexico to join U.S. trade actions against China. He wants Mexico to submit politely to this shakedown, and not make too much fuss.

First, Mexico has helped Trump seal the border. In February, apprehensions at the border dropped below 9,000 for the month, the lowest level since the 1960s. Meanwhile, the  Center for Immigration Studies, an immigration-skeptic group, estimates that U.S. border authorities are catching close to 95 percent of would-be crossers; if so, this means that successful crossings have trickled down to likely the lowest level since the Great Depression.

Mexican cooperation has been indispensable to slowing the flow. From Sheinbaum’s entry into office on October 1, 2024, to the end of that year, Mexico detained almost 500,000 migrants en route to the United States. Conditions in Mexican detention centers are notoriously harsh: They are densely crowded, with insufficient food and water and scant toilet facilities; ordinary migrants are mingled with violent gang members. Mexico’s national human-rights commission has difficulty gaining access to such sites. The high likelihood of ending a thousand-mile journey in a Mexican prison exerts a powerful deterrent effect on would-be immigrants. So do the intense military operations on the Mexico-Guatemala border.

During the Mexican presidential campaign of 2024, immigrants and their advocates expressed hope for a more permissive attitude from Sheinbaum. Instead, Sheinbaum has aligned Mexican policy with Trump’s edicts.

Sheinbaum has also acceded to Trump’s second wish, creating a new program to ease the return of Mexicans deported by the United States. Deportees will be met on arrival, provided with Mexican identity documents, and enrolled in Mexico’s health-care programs. Sheinbaum has indicated willingness to accept non-Mexican deportees and share responsibility for returning them to their home countries, in Central America or elsewhere.

Trump’s third wish—the militarization of drug interdiction—must have been even more difficult for Sheinbaum to grant. For a generation, opposition to a militarized approach to drugs has been a defining issue for the Mexican left, which regarded the country’s deadly drug war as a futile effort to protect Americans from their own country’s social ills. “Hugs, not bullets” was the slogan of Sheinbaum’s predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

As president, however, Sheinbaum has yielded to American pressure. In February, she delivered 29 cartel figures from Mexican custody to U.S. authorities. Extradition was another historical pain point for the Mexican left, with its implied premise that American justice superseded Mexican sovereignty. Sheinbaum dramatically departed from past Mexican practice to surrender the wanted men. Beyond the symbolism of that surrender, bigger things are happening. Sheinbaum has granted permission for U.S. drone surveillance inside Mexico. CNN has reported that the U.S. is even flying Reapers, UAV systems that can carry a missile. For now, apparently, the Reapers fly unarmed, but the instruments for an American air war against cartels are already in place over Mexico.

Sheinbaum has also yielded to U.S. pressure on Trump’s fourth wish: Acquiescence to his tariffs. Unlike Canada, which has countered U.S. tariffs with a retaliatory regime of its own, Mexico has not yet responded in kind, even after Trump’s March 26 tariffs on Mexican auto exports. On Wednesday night, Mexico’s economy minister, Marcelo Ebrard, did hint in a social-media post that Mexican forbearance may at last be coming to an end—or it may not, because Mexican reaction to Trump tariffs has been impelled by considerations very different from Canada’s.

Although the U.S.-Canada-Mexico relationship is in theory a trilateral one, in practice it’s a pair of bilateral deals: U.S.-Canada and U.S.-Mexico. Canada and Mexico have each often sacrificed free-trade ideals to gain national advantage at the expense of the other U.S. trading partner. In the 2020 trade round, Canada tried to score off Mexico by writing a $16-an-hour minimum wage into the regulation of North American trade in automobiles and auto parts. The Canadian scheme backfired, however, when Mexican manufacturers opted out of the free-trade structure designed to keep wages low, correctly calculating that they could out-compete Canada even without tariff-free access to the U.S. marketplace: In 2020, Mexican auto exports to the United States overtook Canadian exports. Sheinbaum seems willing to stay neutral in the U.S.-Canada trade war in hope of collecting an additional share of the U.S. spoils.

On wish five, Sheinbaum is again complying. At the end of February, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent revealed that Mexico had offered to match U.S. tariffs on Chinese exports. Canada, struggling to preserve the remnants of a global free-trade system, has so far opposed this carve-up of the world into trading blocs.

Finally, Mexico has also granted Trump’s sixth wish. Trump cares enormously about deference to his power. Canadian politicians have retorted to Trump’s demeaning comments, most famously in then–Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s televised March 4 words: “Now, it’s not in my habit to agree with The Wall Street Journal. But, Donald, they point out that even though you’re a very smart guy, this is a very dumb thing to do.” Trudeau called Trump by his first name and condemned his decision as “dumb.” Trump and his vice president use rhetoric like that all the time, but they intensely resent its being returned upon them.

Sheinbaum, by contrast, never mentions Trump by name when she replies to U.S. actions against Mexico, not even with her jibe about “America Mexicana.” She is careful not to contradict him in public, and her tight-mouthed restraint earned compliments from Trump.

[David Frum: The failing state next door]

Sheinbaum’s Trump wish fulfillment, especially on immigration, may be good neighborliness that ought to be expected from any Mexican government. But have her methods succeeded in defending Mexico from Trump’s protectionism and aggression? Can they be emulated by others? The answers are “not really,” and “no.”

Mexico has not been exempted from Trump’s economic warfare against former partners, culminating in yesterday’s tariff attack on imports of cars, trucks, and auto components. Mexico is accepting an intrusive and growing U.S. military presence in its airspace that may yet trigger open warfare between the United States and Mexican cartels on Mexican soil. Although Mexico has gained auto-manufacturing share at Canada’s expense since the first Trump administration, Mexican hopes of nearshoring industrial capacity at China’s expense have not come to pass and may now be dashed utterly by Trump’s latest moves to reduce or stop international trade. Trump wants any nearshoring to occur in the United States itself, to benefit his voters in red states.

Things could certainly be worse for Mexico than they are. López Obrador bequeathed a great many vulnerabilities to his successor. He left Mexico with its biggest budget deficit since the catastrophic debt crisis of the early 1980s, exposing the country to exactly the kind of international financial pressure he himself so constantly denounced in speeches. But “things could be worse” is a very limited sort of success. Sheinbaum’s strategy seems to be to succeed only in the sense that others are losing even more.

Even if Sheinbaum’s appeasement approach were Mexico’s best option, her model cannot be emulated by other states, especially democratic ones. A prerequisite for her strategy is that she leads a society that is consolidating into a one-party state, with a media subject to ever more stringent restrictions and government control.

A major reason for Trudeau’s snarky comments to Trump is that Canada is confronting the Trump tariffs at a time of intense political competition. In the federal election scheduled for April 28, Conservatives and Liberals are battling to position themselves as the tougher anti-Trump alternative. Sheinbaum can afford to submit to Trump’s coercion because she commands overwhelming majorities in Congress, doesn’t face the next round of congressional elections until 2027, and has put in place mechanisms to manipulate those elections when they finally come.

Sheinbaum’s political biography is that of a cadre of the left. But today, the most important political cleft is not the fading distinction between right and left, but the rising conflict between liberal and illiberal, democratic and autocratic. As Mexico follows America into illiberality, Mexico’s leadership finds itself surprisingly favored by Trump’s Washington, along with Russia, Saudi Arabia, and El Salvador. In contrast, the formerly close U.S. ally Canada is consigned to join Ukraine, Denmark, Panama, and the democracies of Europe and East Asia on the Trump enemies list.

Sheinbaum’s policy of Trump appeasement may well be the least-bad course open to Mexico. But it should be seen for what it is, not misunderstood as the brave resistance it most definitely is not.

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