I’m tempted to say that the lesson we should draw here is that Team Trump is so stupid that it can’t avoid undermining its own propaganda, but I doubt this was a case of incompetence. My guess is that the White House comms team knew that Noem had published an accurate image of the arrest when they posted their AI version of Levy Armstrong crying. They realized their deceit would be found out. They just didn’t care.
How else should we interpret the defiance with which one team member reacted to being exposed? “YET AGAIN to the people who feel the need to reflexively defend perpetrators of heinous crimes in our country I share with you this message,” he wrote. “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
That much was true, at least. The “memes” will continue.
Strategy or sadism?
The challenge in trying to write thoughtfully about this episode is that it’s often hard to tell which of the administration’s actions are motivated by sinister political strategy and which are motivated by sadism for the sheer fun of it.
It’s not always hard. When the president dances a rhetorical jig on the grave of murder victim Rob Reiner, that’s pure masturbatory ruthlessness. If you told me that the same impulse toward lascivious cruelty had inspired the creatures who run the White House Twitter account to cook up an image of Levy Armstrong crying, I wouldn’t blink. Donald Trump’s political movement, like Trump himself, has always had the soul of an especially spiteful online troll. It’s not a coincidence that his campaign caught on in alt-right social media spaces in 2016.
And so it’s also not a surprise that one of his official spokesmen ended up framing what they did here as a “meme.” Doctoring a photo to humiliate someone and passing it off as real is not what a meme is, but it makes sense that a team of Too Online sociopaths would fall back on nihilistic Internet sh-tposting to guide its understanding of a grave matter like government ethics. It reminds me of DOGE, another Trump enterprise run by a Too Online sociopath: In both cases, people whose chief interest in politics is the pretext it offers to be sadistic on Twitter were handed real power with predictable results.
But I wouldn’t blink either if you told me that the Levy Armstrong fakery is the product of some calculated strategy. Maybe the White House feared MAGA was getting cold feet about ICE’s tactics in Minnesota and assumed that an image of literal liberal tears would boost morale. Maybe they did it to distract Trump voters from their failure to bag the real prize in the church protest—former CNN anchor and longtime right-wing antagonist Don Lemon, who was with the demonstrators and whom the DOJ tried but failed to charge.
Or maybe they simply want to normalize the practice of circulating doctored imagery that embarrasses their opponents. Perhaps they were testing the waters to see what sort of backlash they’d draw for doing it at the expense of an unsympathetic target.
Sadism or strategy: With Team Trump, one never knows.
Revisionism.
There’s a second challenge in trying to assess what motivated them to smear Levy Armstrong. It feels like the Trump administration’s habit of trying to rewrite history to its advantage has gotten worse lately, which might provide a clue of what they’re up to. But has it actually gotten worse?
Maybe not. After all, as is always the case with illiberal political movements, the president and MAGA have been neck-deep in audacious forms of historical revisionism from the beginning.
His first term was bookended by notorious examples. On his second day in office in 2017, he had his press secretary march out and lie to Americans about his inaugural crowd having been the largest ever despite photographic evidence to the contrary. On January 6, 2021, with two weeks left in that term—well, you know that story by now. Suffice it to say, we recently entered Year Six of him trying to rewrite the history of the 2020 election and there’s no sign he’ll be letting up anytime soon.
So it’s hard to say with confidence that his habit of revisionism is getting “worse.” But consider a few things that happened this week.
On Wednesday his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, was irritated by a comment on Twitter alleging that Trump had said “Iceland” instead of “Greenland” repeatedly during a speech in Switzerland. Not so, she insisted, pointing to the president’s written remarks and telling the commenter, “You’re the only one mixing anything up here.”
But Trump did, in fact, say “Iceland” several times when he was supposed to have said “Greenland.” It was on video, the video was circulating widely, and a media professional like her must have known it. What she said wasn’t so much a lie as it was an attempt to create an alternate reality.
A more consequential example came from the president himself when he was asked in an interview about NATO. “We’ve never needed them,” he said, straining to justify his antagonism toward Europe over Greenland. “We have never really asked anything of them. You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan or this and that. And they did. They stayed a little back, little off the front lines.”
They did not stay off the front lines. The United Kingdom, which Trump had planned to tariff for resisting his Greenland grab, lost 457 soldiers in that war. That was the second-highest number of any coalition member after the United States. Third was Canada, the White House’s new nemesis, which lost 159. Denmark lost 43, a killed-in-action rate per capita on par with America’s.
It’s one thing to try to cover up the fact that our very old president sometimes says “Iceland” instead of “Greenland,” but demeaning the sacrifice that American allies made in supporting a war that was triggered by an attack on our country, not theirs, is revisionism at its most morally repulsive—and stupid. (Reaction on social media is what you’d assume it would be.) Why tell a lie that the world not only knows is a lie but which it will rightly despise you for telling?
There were also examples of historical revisionism carried out this week at the White House’s behest for more ideological reasons. In Philadelphia, the National Park Service just removed a memorial to slaves who were held by George Washington when he lived there, the latest instance of the administration erasing references to America’s original sin on federal property. The work is being carried out pursuant to an executive order which, in part, requires the Department of the Interior to remove material that has “created a false revision of history,” a fine Orwellian irony.
Even the White House’s scientific policies have the stink of revisionism about them. The new man in charge of vetting vaccines for federal approval told an interviewer yesterday that it’s time to revisit whether polio is truly as dangerous as we’ve always assumed. “We need to not be afraid to consider that we are in a different time now than we were then,” he said, referring to the prevalence of the disease before vaccination. “Our sanitation is different, our risk of disease is different, and so those all play into the evaluation of whether this is worthwhile of taking a risk for a vaccine or not.”
If you thought DOGE racked up an impressive body count by letting information-bubble dilettantes play with the federal government’s matchbook, wait until the new CDC gets rolling.
Impunity, not credibility.
Taking all of this in, you might discern that the White House has itself a little credibility problem and should take special care not to make it worse. Credibility is, or should be, important to political leaders, no? If Trump wants Americans to accept that heavy-handed ICE tactics are necessary in Minneapolis, he should also want Americans not to have good reason to doubt literally everything that comes out of his administration’s collective mouth.
Viewed that way, distorting a photo of Nekima Levy Armstrong and getting caught red-handed for doing so is as dumb and self-defeating a bit of propaganda as the Trump team has ever uncorked. “Propaganda doesn’t concern itself with what’s true, it concerns itself with what’s useful,” I wrote in 2024, but the AI image of her dissolving into tears isn’t obviously useful to the administration. “People will think: When you guys post images of Venezuelan drug boats, why should we believe you? In fact, why should we believe anything you say?” a digital-forensics expert told the Washington Post of the White House’s chicanery.
At best, the doctored photo is a cheap schadenfreudean thrill for MAGA sadists who can’t experience human joy anymore without knowing that their enemies are suffering emotionally somewhere.
There’s another way to understand the decision to doctor the photo, though. The White House knew that doing so would hurt its credibility, and that was sort of the point.
Radley Balko is a journalist who’s spent years covering police misconduct. A few days ago he published an op-ed contrasting how police departments typically handle fatal shootings by officers with how the administration handled an ICE agent’s shooting of Renee Good. The striking thing about the government’s dishonest spin on the incident wasn’t how deceptive it was, he explained. It was the fact that, in its sheer audacity, it didn’t seem intended to actually deceive anyone.
“It isn’t just the lying; it’s that the lies are wildly exaggerated and easily refutable,” he wrote about the killing, a point I’ve made myself. “The lies this administration is telling about Ms. Good aren’t those you deploy as part of a cover-up. They’re those you use when you want to show you can get away with anything. They’re a projection of power.”
Precisely so, and the Levy Armstrong AI fakery is a variation on the same point. Doctoring an image of a protester when the undoctored version has already been posted by one of your own Cabinet members isn’t something you do if you’re trying to mislead people without getting caught. It’s what you do when you’re trying to mislead people and don’t care if you get caught.
That’s what “the memes will continue” means. The White House created and circulated a false reality to make its political opponents look bad, it’s not the least bit sorry, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. The memes will continue.
“We will do what we like, and you will have no choice but to tolerate it” is the Trump administration’s entire ethos, especially on foreign policy (and especially lately). It’s a perfect one-line summary of his approach to Venezuela’s new government, for instance, and seemed to aptly describe his attitude toward Denmark over Greenland until global investors showed him that, actually, they do have a choice.
Pardoning filthy white-collar con artists, siccing the Justice Department on enemies, tariffing countries out of personal pique, sending ICE to kick in people’s doors without a warrant, ignoring laws passed by Congress with supermajority margins: They will do what they like, and you will have no choice but to tolerate it. The memes will continue.
In fact, not only will they continue, the people creating them will scold you for raising the political temperature if you refuse to accept their authority to do what they like.
So there’s the answer, I think, to the question I posed earlier. Asking whether the doctored photo of Nekima Levy Armstrong is sadism or strategy assumes a false choice; forcing Americans to get used to sadism from their government is the strategy. If the administration enjoys impunity for behaving sadistically toward its enemies, it doesn’t—and needn’t—care about its credibility. What does it matter whether the average joe believes the things it says or the images it posts if the White House is free to do what it likes and that average joe has no choice but to tolerate it?
“There’s no sense of, ‘Oh no, we were caught using a synthetically generated image,” one journalism professor complained to The Independent about yesterday’s incident. “All gloves are off. People don’t seem to care.” As long as roughly half the country is willing to believe, or to pretend to believe, the administration in the name of supplying the political resolve necessary to keep the sadism going, the memes will continue. Enjoy the age of AI-produced government disinformation.
