by Deepika Shrestha ‘27

The official White House X page posted a video on February 18 titled, “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight,” and the video went viral for the wrong reasons. The video showed ICE agents chaining up illegal immigrants in long chains and putting them on planes. The video received a lot of backlash, with many calling the video dehumanizing. There are others who praised the video and shared their views that they would love to see illegal immigrants go back to their country.

The ‘ASMR’ video came a few days after the the White House posted an edited valentine card with Trump’s and “border czar” Tom Homan’s faces on it. The words were, “roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally, and we’ll deport you.” Since his second presidency has begun, Trump also posted on X a Spongebob meme that had a list of what federal workers got done when they did not reply to Elon Musk’s demand that they email what five things they got done the previous week. In the areas of international affairs, Trump posted an AI-created video of what would happen to the Gaza Strip if he took over. The Gaza Strip would be revamped to have a Trump hotel, statute, and lots of money. The White House also posted a video of a deportation of an illegal immigrant getting handcuffed with the lyrics from the song Closing Time, “you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

The Trump White House is apparently trying to have an influencer style of posting in which messages are directly for the people. The strategy of the posting is to aggressively tone out other narratives against the Trump administration. The outrageous and often cruel posts are a marketing strategy to get people to look at their content and find support for Trump. The White House has a social media team that is working around the clock in order to make different content for their page and also Trump’s.

It’s concerning that there is staff hired to specifically make this type of content that represents the United States of America and its current president. There is no decency with content that makes fun of people, and it’s especially wrong when it comes from a national government. Posts coming from the White House should be respectful of individuals and groups rather than trying to mimic the styles of popular influencers. This type of content is an embarrassment to everybody in this country.