Everything Reacting to Everything, All at Once

[Celerity]

Why the Trump administration is posting messages like “THIS IS OUR HEMISPHERE” after the attack on Venezuela

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/01/trump-venezuela-memes/685525/

https://archive.ph/ciQ7Z



This weekend’s attack on Venezuela produced plenty of indelible images. The one burned into my brain was shared by President Donald Trump on Truth Social. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is sitting in front of a laptop at a makeshift command center in Mar-a-Lago. He’s monitoring the raid with a grave expression on his face, eyes intently focused on something out of frame.

At first glance, the image has all the trappings of a Serious Tactical Raid Photo, à la Pete Souza’s famous Situation Room snapshot, which showed President Barack Obama and his national-security team tracking the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. But then you see what’s behind Hegseth: a large screen displaying an X feed. The photo is blurry, but it seems to show Hegseth and company using X’s search function to monitor tweets about the raid. On the screen, hovering over Hegseth’s left shoulder, is a giant face-holding-back-tears emoji ( 🥹 ) .

The photo quickly spread around the internet on Saturday—mostly as a way to mock just how terminally online the Trump administration appears to be. “They monitor the situation just like how we do,” one person who works in crypto wrote on X. On Bluesky, I watched others make fun of Hegseth, Trump, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio as part of a “podcaster-occupied government.”

It is no secret that the Trump administration is social media–addled. Over the past year, most of the government’s major online accounts—especially on X—have become megaphones for cruel and racist shitposting, not unlike what one might see from a garden-variety troll on 4chan. These accounts have shared deportation ASMR; an AI-generated, Studio Ghiblified version of a real photo of a crying woman being arrested by ICE; a post comparing immigrants to the alien vermin in the Halo video-game series; and Nazi-coded “Defend the fatherland” memes. And who could forget the AI-slop video of Trump in a fighter jet dropping what appeared to be human feces on protesters in Times Square. These official government communications are a key part of how the Trump administration does its job. It is governance through content creation.

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