We Deport. You Laugh?
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If you spend a decent amount of time online, you have probably come across the menswear guy. His real name is Derek Guy, but that's not what most people call him. Yeah, the menswear guy. So he has a million followers on X. He is basically a menswear fashion influencer. That's Drew Harwell, who writes about tech for The Washington Post.

He goes viral all the time because he makes these very funny, but also very sarcastic, snarky breakdowns of specifically men's fashion. Sometimes I'll just be talking about the history of tailoring, but oftentimes he'll be pulling out celebrities, you know, MAGA politicians, random people, and just making fun of like, oh, your collar. A lot of like takedowns of Andrew Tate style. Yeah, exactly. Like his pants are too tight. I'll tell you why. The collar is weird. Yeah.

And so, you know, they're very funny and he's targeted people like J.D. Vance. And so he's kind of like gotten his own critics who don't like him. And so anyway, Derek Guy had come out with this very personal post on X where he basically said that when he was a baby, he was brought to the U.S. from Vietnam. His family was fleeing the Vietnam War.

and that they had come. And at the time, you know, this was years ago, but at the time, the questions of how long they could be here, whether they were officially documented, were kind of unclear. Basically, he was, you know, copying to the fact that there are many people in this country whose status has been questionable in terms of whether they're legally in the country and that he is one of them.

It was a much more personal post than usual. He wasn't critiquing style. He wasn't attacking anyone. It was just his family's story. But...

The people who were already kind of on his bad side, especially people on the American right, really took that as like something to fight back at him. And they were saying stuff like, you know, I hope you've been brushing up on your Vietnamese. Like, let's deport this guy. This guy just confessed. Like, let's get him out of here. And all of this was kind of happening among the very like brash online right people.

And then out of nowhere, somebody had made a message to J.D. Vance himself, the vice president, and said, J.D. Vance could do the funniest thing right now, basically insinuating, let's deport this guy. He made fun of your clothes, J.D., now you can deport him. And J.D. Vance said,

specifically, personally responded on X by himself. He included a meme of Jack Nicholson from some movie, like, shaking his head, yes, like, nodding. The Departed. Yeah, from The Departed. Like, smiling and nodding. Long story short, I mean, the vice president made a specific joke about deporting of somebody who had made fun of him online, and it was just unusual. You know, for... The vice president threatened a guy on the internet. The vice president threatened to deport a guy online.

on the internet, who had made fun of his pants. And it wasn't just fans. The Department of Homeland Security's official account weighed in, tweeting a meme from Spy Kids 2. And this style just seems to be how the administration communicates online now, especially around immigration and deportation. Yo, VIP, let's kick it.

About a week ago, DHS posted this video to Instagram that purports to show ICE agents, get it? Vanilla ice? Breaking up what they say is a cartel party in South Carolina.

This was from an official account, right? These are government accounts. For years and years, these have been about the most boring places on the internet. Official Washington agencies that would put out pretty standard, dry social media posts. And yet, in the last couple months, I've seen them be taken over by...

Memes, like cruel memes, music videos, jokes, weird references to Star Wars and Ice Ice Baby. And they're coming from the federal government. Under that ICE video, the top comment is, what the actual fuck? Another says, is decency in education illegal in the USA? But then there's one that says, amazing, LMAO.

Today on the show, the Trump administration's deportation meme machine. They want you to laugh, but do Americans find this funny? I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around. ♪

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That's A-G-N-T-C-Y dot O-R-G. When did you first start to notice the Trump administration posting these types of memes and meme-y videos?

It was really soon after the inauguration, like right as Trump got into the White House, this attitude you could really see on social media already. And some of it extends back to the campaign and last year. And I've talked to people who were on the Trump campaign. And you saw a little bit of this vibe coming from the Kamala Harris campaign, too. But they were very meme focused, right? Kamala Harris is brat.

Right. Kamala HQ. And I've done I've done reporting on both teams. And they were you know, this was a lot of like Generation Z digital strategists, social media people who were on the team. They were all about going viral. They're all about capturing people's attention no matter how they wanted to. And the vibe was very different. Right. Because you had the Trump team that was very apocalyptic. Yeah.

The videos were a lot of fear, a lot of anger, a lot of outrage about how terrible the country was under President Biden. Then under Kamala Harris, you had much more of a leading with joy, you know, criticizing, kind of mocking the Trump people by being very like buoyant and bubbly. And so, yeah.

I noticed the meme forward attitude of social media way back then. But after Trump took the White House, I kind of expected some of that to die down. That was not the case this year. And I remember back to around Valentine's Day. So this would have been only a couple of weeks after the inauguration.

when the official White House account put up a Valentine, like a little Valentine Day card, and it was Trump's face in the face of border czar Tom Homan. And it was, you know, roses are red, violets are blue. If you come into this country illegally, we'll deport you.

And again, it was like played for laughs and it went viral and people who supported it were sharing it like this is hilarious and people who were against it were sharing it because they were so outraged by it. And that was just a big flag to me that this vibe is not going away. Can you give me some examples of ones that have really stuck out to you?

One of the biggest shockers to me, I think, was there was a photo of a crying woman in Pennsylvania who she was somebody they said had been deported once, had come back into the country illegally. They said at some point she had been convicted of selling fentanyl or something like that. And there was a photo taken at the scene of this woman, and she's just basically openly sobbing with all of these federal agents around her.

And the White House not only shared that photo, at the time people were making these like AI memes of the kind of Japanese cartoon that was very sort of cartoony, the Studio Ghibli. They made an AI treatment of that photo of her crying. So it's like a guy in a camouflage hat and the woman who's like weeping. She's got the hairnet. She's got the handcuffs and she's standing in front of an American flag. And people were just like,

laughing at this in the comments. And this is a woman, like literally in the AI cartoon, like you can see her tears falling from her eyes. And, you know, no matter what you think of the issue, right, it's really unusual for the White House to be identifying an individual who is having her life upended, no matter what happened, and like pulling out somebody to really just like

twist the knife. And it's just so, you know, when you're thinking about the government that runs, you know, this country that 300 million people are in, just imagine to be that person and be made like the laughingstock by the federal government. It's just really, it just really jumped out to me as something we've never really seen before. And, you know, we've always seen the government treat these things really very sterilely, you know, very seriously. And so for this to become just one big joke was pretty shocking.

Are these going out on all different social media platforms? Are they targeted? Like, I'm wondering if there's an aim to try to reach specific audiences or if they're more broad based than that. Yeah, so that was one other surprise thing to me.

Of course, these are going out on X. It's formerly Twitter. And X is just basically, you know, a toxic stew at this point. You can't really be surprised. And, you know, it's I guess it's surprising to see the White House be doing it there. But it's always just kind of like a partisan battleground, especially now with Elon Musk in charge. So they're doing it there. But they're also doing it on these places that I think are more mainstream. Right. You will see a lot of these memes on Instagram. You'll see them on TikTok. You'll see them on Facebook. You

These are people that a bunch of polarized, partisan, news junkie MAGA warriors are not spending time on. They're like where normal American people are spending time on, and yet they're aiming that same kind of disturbing joke at those kinds of people. So that jumped out to me too because...

For the Trump people to put out something that is provocative, that triggers the libs, that's red meat for the base, that's not new. But the fact that they're really going after this mainstream base and thinking that they can shape the conversation with them, and I know that because they've told me that this is part of the strategy, that they want to reframe the narrative away from what

We in the traditional media, how we talk about deportations and make it more of this thing that is a little more jokey and that it is a more bombastic and bold. And one of the White House people I talked to said, this is our our strategy is smash mouth. Right. We just want to smash you right in the face with our message. We want everybody to be talking about it, everybody to be paying attention to it, because.

We think we're on the right side. We think voters have given us the mandate to talk about immigration in this way. And we think that most Americans will be on our side. They won't care that we're laughing about somebody being shipped out of the country. We think they voted for it. And they'll find some level of appreciation for how candid we're talking about this. As you've reported, there's like a team of people who are doing this in the White House, in different agencies. Like, who's doing this?

How much money are they spending? Like, what is the meme project exactly?

There are digital strategy teams in the White House. There are rapid response professional posters, basically, in some of these agencies. And that's not entirely new, right? Companies and government agencies have been like professionalizing the posting part of this for a long time. But from the White House perspective, I mean, these are people who their mandate is to get attention by any means necessary. And when I've talked to them, they're

And they've said, you know, we watch President Trump's posts. We get the sense of what he's going to talk about. And we really just try to match that vibe. And we do that, you know, in the ways that work for going viral, which is fantastic.

memes and videos. So these are people being paid to do this. And I think back to 10 years ago when Trump was really coming up and MAGA was getting more popular online and they were doing a lot of these memes, right, too. And a lot of them were very crude. And a lot of them were coming from places like 4chan and the Donald that were far right forums that like specialized in being gleeful about

libs and people they don't like getting hurt. But those were like, that was like a crowdsourced group of people that were basically on the fringes. You'd have to go to these places to find these people. Whereas now you can go on X and see these kinds of jokes everywhere. And I kind of think about it as like the government is 4chanifying itself. They're really taking that vibe of just like being outrage merchants and making that into something that they feel like can get their cause across.

After the break, governments, ours included, have long engaged in propaganda. How do these deportation memes fit into that nationalist tradition? This message is brought to you by Apple Pay. Forget your wallet. It's all good. Because with Apple Pay, you can pay with a simple tap of your iPhone, the wallet you never forget, at millions of places worldwide, including websites, apps, and anywhere you see the contactless symbol.

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Try it today at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. Who is this for? Is this for the MAGA base to own the libs? Is it about convincing normies that these policies are the correct choice? Like...

Can the administration articulate to you why they feel like dehumanizing memes is the way to make their case?

So I think that's the most important and most interesting question. And when I've talked to them, they've said the success is in our engagement numbers. We can post these memes and they'll be seen on X 10 million times, 50 million times. And we know it's working and, you know, it's pissing off all the right people. And so we're going to keep doing it. And I think that is one way to look at it. And maybe they're right. Yeah.

I think you can see the other side of it where, you know, when I've talked to people who are critical of this, they say, and some of these are former kind of MAGA conservative people. I talked to one guy who was very prominent in the 2016 meme lord days of MAGA. And he said, you know, and he so he contributed some to

to some of those jokes even back then. And now he sort of feels like it's gone way too far. You're making jokes about stuff that most Americans are completely turned off by. And that, you know, you may be feeding red meat to people who were predisposed to find these things funny, but everybody else, you might be turning them off and making them feel like you're making this big joke about it. I think really the subtext of the goal for what the administration is trying to do is

shift the Overton window for how we think about these things and really kind of normalize how we talk about them. You know, the idea is that if they make enough jokes about this, if they post enough videos about this, then we'll be thinking about deportation on their terms. So like, are we playing into that by having this conversation? I don't know. Maybe.

I actually kind of feel like it's important for us to identify these things and talk about these things and not just let this be something that people randomly scroll by and to really understand the strategy here. Because this is a strategy. This is a tactic to score political points. And so if you disagree with it or if you agree with it, it's worth understanding how it works and processing that and talking about it.

Okay, but do normies exist online? You and I, I like you a lot, Drew, but we're not normal people. We are online for our jobs. We are hyper attuned to the news cycle for our jobs. And so I guess I wonder, like, is the hope here in the White House's eyes that, like,

Somebody shares this image in their PTA WhatsApp and somebody else says like, ha ha. Oh, that's rude, but funny. Like, is that what they're going for?

I think about this as like everybody is a piece of cloth and we're all dipped into the muck at different rates. Like you and I are completely stained. We're immersed in the mess. We're completely died through. Most people are dipped in a very short amount, right? They'll be scrolling through it on their phone every so often. They'll hear a joke randomly. They might hear 1% of the things that we hear from online. And so that actually explains why

why they would be doing these kinds of attention-grabbing posts, right? If only the top 1% of posts really get across, then they're going to go to the extremes to be that post. So, you know, maybe there are no normies left on X post,

But there's a lot of normies on Instagram, right? And there's a lot of normies who have one friend who is on Instagram or on Facebook. And so these messages can get to them. And that's why I feel like it's worth taking seriously, right? This is not just an echo chamber of people talking to each other that's in a vacuum that never affects politics. Like, we know these things affect politics because social media is where the whole political game is played anymore. I mean, I think we can call this what it is, or at least I'm comfortable doing that. It's propaganda.

And there was a long history in this country and in others of leaders using propaganda for their ends, both sort of unofficially enlisting Hollywood and the music industry. But then also, you know, before I came in to talk to you, I was like looking at World War II era posters, some really racist ones about the Japanese. You've got, you know, your war bonds, your victory gardens, and then you have these like caricatures of people

the enemy and saying, like, report things that you see that the Germans would approve of. And I guess what I'm trying to tease out is whether this is all that different or whether there's some significant tonal shift where it feels like you've got the White House, like, rolling around in the muck, too.

I think you really can't ignore that there are parallels. And they see these parallels, too. I mean, the Department of Homeland Security and the White House just a couple days ago posted a meme that was Uncle Sam nailing a sign to the wall. It says, help your country and yourself. And below it, it says, report all foreign invaders. It has the ICE number. It has a hotline. It says, you know, help your country arrest illegal aliens. Didn't that originate on a white nationalist site?

It did, yes. And it was shared by white nationalists, white supremacists online. They were very happy to see that post.

be promoted by official accounts. But, you know, even the text, foreign invaders, right? We're not talking about foreign invaders. We're talking about undocumented immigrants, people who've been here sometimes 20 years, 30 years, people who are maybe not even criminals, maybe just people living their lives. And so I think even the ways we talk about it and the memes we share, those do serve that same purpose. And

There's a reason why the White House is always never referring to them as people. They're always criminal aliens. They're always foreign invaders. And that's kind of why these memes and videos are so striking is that they are always something that is

a little bit less than human, right? There are videos where it's like Star Wars and DHS, the Border Patrol is Darth Vader and he's cutting down like the fake news and the illegal invaders. You know, they're always just kind of like symbols. They're never real people. And so I think that's part of the meme and joke effect too, is you're really changing how you talk about

They're not just humans. They're just kind of like they're they're problems to be solved by kicking out of the country. And so I think that's, you know, and again, we we have parallels to this in history. This happens a lot. And now just we have that social media layer on top of it, making it that much more hard to ignore.

You know, there's been a lot of reporting recently about how strategists in the Democratic Party are looking for a way to be online and in touch with extremely online communities in a way that Republicans seem to have maybe successfully done. We reported on that here at Slate, some tweets that seem very unlike regular Democratic Party tweets online.

Do we know anything about how Mimi takes play with people with different political affiliations?

I think we kind of don't. You know, I think when pollsters ask people about political issues, they don't often ask, like, how did this meme affect how you feel about this one issue? I mean, we can kind of go off the engagement data. Right. But engagement, engagement, as we know from covering social media, is a really blunt metric and things that amp up engagement.

sometimes are just the most inflammatory things. 100%. It's a completely flawed metric. And yet, if you are making content and it's the only metric you have, you're going to lean into whatever makes the number get bigger. And so I think that is part of why we see these posts becoming more and more extreme is that

If you hate it, if you love it, you're going to share it. And the number being high is all you really care about, right? You're not polling every person to think about whether this is good or bad. But you are definitely seeing the Democrats being more brash and more hard edged and really like trying to mock the other side. Because they want their own manosphere.

I mean, they want influence, right? They want people to share their stuff. People have kind of like reduced the campaign and why Trump won to him being like going on to all these podcasts and tapping into the Joe Rogan. And the shorthand has been like the left just needs their own Joe Rogan, which is a really kind of superficial way to think about it. I think what's

What Trump's strategy was, was that he was going to put himself out there no matter what the opportunity was. And he was just going to be him, like raw Trump talking for three hours on a show. And with Kamala Harris campaign, you didn't see that as much. Right. You saw more traditional photo ops. You saw more tightly controlled photos.

interviews. And who knows if that really made any difference. But you're starting to see the Democrats lean into more of that unhinged vibe. And they're more of their kind of like resistance campaign against Trump. And so both sides are really trying to pull that into their playbook and really like be out there and open, knowing that they may only have a couple of chances to reach people. And so they're going to do whatever they can to to survive and get that attention.

Listening to you, I am so struck by how authenticity, and I'm using that word in air quotes, is currency online. But also, if I cast my brain back 10 years, I have an image of then-candidate Donald Trump making fun of Serge Kovalevsky, a reporter from The New York Times with a disability. Yeah, he says he didn't, but we've all seen the video. Come on. This just feels like that image.

but online. Will we be communicating like this for every campaign and administration to come?

Unless somebody proposes an alternative that is nicer, that is just as grabby, but also more humane, it's possible, right? I mean, they do this because it works. That's one thing from political strategy. They do it because it works. And until it doesn't work anymore, they're going to keep doing it. And, you know, when the Trump team and when the White House has put out posts that infuriate people, that outrage people, it's not going to work.

That gets shared because of that. They love it, right? They say, OK, we're going to do more like this because it worked. It made all the people we don't like mad. It made our people happy. Unless people choose to respond to different posts in different ways, I think one thing that is instructive is really the public policy.

polling on issues like this. I will say for all the memes and jokes, the polling is actually not on Donald Trump's side. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows that Trump's approval on immigration is actually underwater. Fifty-four percent of registered voters don't approve of how he's handling the issue. Forty-three percent do. The numbers are even worse for his deportation policy, with 56 percent of registered voters disapproving.

He gets pretty negative marks for how he's handling immigration and deportation. Whether that's affected by the social media, we don't know. But if it was really working, maybe the numbers would be reversed, right? And maybe he would be getting positive marks. So I think that's one thing to watch is that if they continue doing these kinds of posts and the result remains that Trump is underwater on this really central issue, then maybe they go back to the drawing board and say, yeah,

Maybe we do something different. Drew Harwell, thank you so much for your reporting and for coming on to talk about it. Yeah, thanks for having me. Drew Harwell is a reporter for The Washington Post. And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Patrick Fort and Shaina Raw. Our show is edited by Evan Campbell.

TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And if you want to check out more great Slate shows, listen to Monday's episode of What Next. Mary Harris talks to a former member of the CDC panel responsible for vaccines, one who was just fired by RFK Jr. We'll be back on Sunday with more episodes. I'm Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks so much for listening.