White House Shitposting: Inside the Online Strategy
Hello and welcome to Regulator,a newsletter for Verge subscribers about the technology,broligarchs and brainrot rapidly transforming politics and civic society. Not subscribed to The Verge yet? You should! It can materially improve your life.
Last week was a grim reminder that no matter what sort of horror is being perpetrated or how many people end up dead, the Trump governance’s knee-jerk response is to shitpost thru it. The White House’s response on X to abducting the head of a sovereign nation? “FAFO”. the response to an ICE agent shooting a woman in broad daylight? A Buzzfeed-style listicle of “57 Times Sick, Unhinged Democrats Declared War on law Enforcement.” ICE agents arresting protesters? “Welcome to the Find Out stage.”
To the vast majority of people following current events,the Trump administration’s meme-ing is blunt and cruel. But the jaded political insider will also view Trump’s meme fusillade as an element of a media strategy known as “rapid response”: the full-time work of quickly shaping the political narrative of a breaking news event, sometimes within minutes, before the news media and your opponents can shape it for you.
“Every political office, every political campaign, has a dedicated operation that helps them respond strategically to events in the news that are out of their control.” Lis Smith, a high-profile Democratic communications strategist based in New York City, told me. It’s a profession that dates back to the beginning of the 24-hour news cycle, when cable shows could quickly assemble a panel of pundits to discuss current events, and the workload has grown exponentially in the age of social media. “You cannot control all the narratives that are going to be out there, so you need to be able to manage the chaos that’s coming into your world.”
Smith served as the director of rapid response for Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, which was one of the first to fully take advantage of social media, and worked
“A meme that is funny or cruel will probably spread faster than anything with nuance”
This interview has been edited for clarity.
You came up during an era where Twitter, before it was X, was really the only internet media environment for politics. How has the practice of rapid response changed in an environment where there is so much narrative to control over so many types of media?
It’s gotten a lot harder. in the ’90s, the big change was the 24-hour news cycle with cable news. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the big development was social media, Twitter, and being able to respond in real time online to news developments. But now, there’s no
The problem is that when you reduce these very serious issues to a meme, you lose a lot of context and you lose a lot of humanity in it. So when you see the administration posting sort-of-funny memes about deportations or ICE, you lose a lot of the empathy and compassion that most people have when it comes to the immigration debate. Most people think that illegal immigration is bad and that we should do something about it. But most people also understand that there are real people who are involved in all of these situations and don’t think it’s funny to make light of, say, school pickups getting raided, or families getting separated, or parents crying as they’re being dragged away from their kids.
I was listening to Joe Rogan interviewing Shane Gillis, and they actually touched on this. I woudl say both Rogan and Shane Gillis are people who were favorable to Trump in the election – Rogan more so than Shane Gillis – but Gillis said, I want our government to take the issue of illegal immigration seriously. I don’t want it to be funny to them. And I think that’s something that really taps into how most people feel about these issues.
If you reduce these very serious issues to cruel, funny memes, you’re going to alienate a lot of people who might be there with you on an issue if you’d approached it with a little bit more maturity and humanity. But the administration is saying, cut out the humanity, cut out the maturity. those things don’t matter. Because a viral meme – a meme that is funny or cruel – will probably spread faster than anything with nuance. They’re prioritizing speed and virality over nuance and seriousness.
I think you just refined what we’ve been thinking about at The Verge: the way that my coworkers saw Trump’s abduction of Maduro and their response to the ICE shooting was that this government’s policy is a meme mentality – their speed, virality and the need to get their spin out first before anyone feels any sort of way about it.
There’s a short window when people - everyone from reporters to voters to anyone online – are trying to figure out what the hell’s going on and what they think about breaking news. Rapid response is about stepping into that void and shaping it,but there are real problems with how the Trump administration is doing it. Ultimately, yes, they may win some sort of short-term viral meme war. But in the long term, the way that they’re communicating about these issues – whether it’s the fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, or deportations in general - they’re gonna lose the political debate. People want action on these issues, but they don’t want wanton cruelty.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.