The slopaganda era: 10 AI images posted by the White House - and what they teach us
Under Donald Trump, the White House has filled its social media with memes, wishcasting, nostalgia and deepfakes. Here’s what you need to know to navigate the trolling.
It started with an image of Trump as a king mocked up on a fake Time magazine cover. Since then it’s developed into a full-blown phenomenon, one academics are calling “slopaganda” – an unholy alliance of easily available AI tools and political messaging. “Shitposting”, the publishing of deliberately crude, offensive content online to provoke a reaction, has reached the level of “institutional shitposting”, according to Know Your Meme’s editor Don Caldwell. This is trolling as official government communication. And nobody is more skilled at it than the Trump administration – a government that has not only allowed the AI industry all the regulative freedom it desires, but has embraced the technology for its own in-house purposes.
Here are 10 of the most significant fake images the White House has put out so far.
Trump as king
19 February 2025
The first AI image posted by the White House X account sets the tone for Trump’s second presidency – marking a turning point in which the shitposting that had been associated with the far-right online culture that brought Trump to power moved from fringe message boards, such as 4chan and Reddit, to mainstream platforms.
The image was posted alongside an announcement of the repeal of New York City’s congestion pricing, and leant into fears that Trump would govern as a king. The New York governor, Kathy Hochul, held up the image at a press conference when she announced that she would defy attempts to block the congestion charge: “New York hasn’t laboured under a king in over 250 years. We sure as hell are not going to start now.” The congestion charge remains in effect.
In another post on Truth Social in October, the president posted an AI video depicting himself as a president-king, crown on head, flying over “No Kings” protesters in a jet fighter and dumping faeces on them. The House speaker, Mike Johnson, defended the post, saying: “The president uses social media to make a point. You can argue that he’s probably the most effective person who’s ever used social media for that. He is using satire to make a point.”
Studio Ghibli meme of a woman being deported
27 March 2025
OpenAI’s Studio Ghibli-inspired meme generator became a sensation in March 2025, with its uncanny ability to translate any image into the beloved anime studio’s house style (without Studio Ghibli’s permission or approval).
The White House applied it to a woman in tears as she was arrested by Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents before being deported. The original photograph, and the woman’s name and alleged crimes, are also included in the post.
For Caldwell, this demonstrated just how up to date the White House is with online trends. “They’re hopping on brand-new, fresh memes,” he says. He suspects White House staffers might be regular visitors to Know Your Meme. “The Studio Ghibli meme trend kicked off on March 25 on X; we covered it the following day; and then the White House covered it the day after that.”
Trump as Pope
3 May 2025
This image is proof of Trump’s willingness and ability to insert himself into any conversation, even ones that have nothing to do with him, and shows how effective that can be.
Predictably, the image went viral, made global headlines and was met with outrage from Catholic groups and politicians. “There is nothing clever or funny about this image, Mr President,” wrote the New York State Catholic Conference. “We just buried our beloved Pope Francis and the cardinals are about to enter a solemn conclave to elect a new successor of St Peter. Do not mock us.”
As so often happens with such shitposting, those who took offence were accused of lacking a sense of humour. “They can’t take a joke?” Trump said soon after at a press conference. “You don’t mean the Catholics, you mean the fake news media … the Catholics loved it.”
Trump as Jedi
4 May 2025
Trump has been the subject of flattering fan art throughout his political career (remember the digital Trump trading cards?), but AI has made the job a whole lot easier. On 4 May, the White House crashed Star Wars fans’ special day with this image of the president as a jacked Jedi, lightsaber in hand, garlanded by flags and eagles. Who cares if his lightsaber is the wrong colour (the good guys’ are blue), or that the White House’s claim to be the Rebellion not the Empire rang laughably hollow? This was pure fantasy art.
In 2022, one of Trump’s trading cards clumsily grafted his headshot on to a superhero body; last July he was slightly less clumsily grafted on to the body of Superman, to gatecrash the launch of the new movie. The same month, the White House portrayed a besuited Trump heroically striding into the Colosseum. Fans and allies have generated reams of similar content themselves.
Hakeem Jeffries as a Mexican
29 October 2025
Why did the White House choose to put the Democratic house leader Hakeem Jeffries and the senate leader Chuck Schumer in sombreros and have them holding plates of tacos? It doesn’t matter. They look a bit silly, and it’s provocatively offensive, and once again, the world’s attention is colonised.
The image illustrates how difficult it is to respond to this type of content. It’s part of a running joke, stretching back to a deepfake video Trump posted a month earlier, which slapped a crude sombrero and moustache filter over Jeffries. That video was roundly condemned as offensive and racist , not least by Jeffries himself (who replied by posting a genuine image of Trump with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein) . The Trump administration then doubled down, playing the video on a loop on screens in the White House briefing room for several hours and creating more images in a similar vein, which kept the trolling going.
Welcome to the Golden Age
1 January 2026
Few people outside the Trump administration believe the US is in a “golden age”, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from repeating the claim. In January, the White House posted an AI video of a golden White House facade behind a shower of gold coins with the text “The White House? She’s in her Golden Age”, backed by Bruno Mars’ track 24K Magic.
Even if Trump’s Midas touch is more a figment of his imagination, this type of wishcasting is more effective than it appears. According to one paper by the academics Michał Klincewicz, Mark Alfano and Amir Ebrahimi Fard – who coined the term “slopaganda” – “neural representations of information that were shown to be false continue to influence people’s beliefs and reasoning after being corrected”. In other words, even when you know it’s fake, your brain still kind of believes it.
Which Way, Greenland Man?
14 January 2026
On the face of it, this seems like a straightforward “Trump wants Greenland” post. However, it has a much darker message.
Again, the post is riffing on a popular meme, Caldwell explains: the “dramatic crossroads” image originated with the manga series Yu-Gi-Oh!, and started gaining traction online around 2021.
The slogan “Which way, Greenland man?” seems to reference a 1978 neo-Nazi text titled Which Way, Western Man?, in which the white supremacist author William Gayley Simpson called for violence against and the deportation of Jews and Black people, and argued that Hitler was right.
“It’s absolutely shocking to see such images being deployed by this administration,” said Heidi Beirich, a co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, which monitors US neo-Nazi groups. “The idea appeals to racists and white supremacists who think only white people should be in positions of power.”
In August, the Department of Homeland Security posted a mock recruitment advert for ICE with an image of Uncle Sam at a crossroads and the slogan: “Which way, American man?” Earlier this month, the US Labor Department posted an image with the slogan: “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage”. Critics pointed out that it had overtones of Hitler’s “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (“One people, one realm, one leader”).
Stand with ICE Propaganda poster
15 January 2026
“AI is very good at constantly reiterating images from the past, so it can create this nostalgic imagery of traditionalism,” says Daniel de Zeeuw, an assistant professor in digital media culture at the University of Amsterdam. Thus the extremist messages of the present – such as ICE’s militarised policing – can be inserted into more reassuring and familiar graphic styles, such as patriotic recruitment posters, 80s action-movie posters or 1950s public information campaigns (as with a recent image of Trump as a friendly milkman).
AI is inherently backward-looking, says de Zeeuw, as it is fed on historical images. This aesthetic is in keeping with the Make America Great Again movement, which is constantly evoking a “better” past. Another stark example was the Department of Homeland Security’s chilling post from last December: an image of a vintage car at a deserted, palm-fringed beach with the slogan “America After 100 Million Deportations”. Ironically, the original was painted by a Japanese artist, Hiroshi Nagai, who complained that it had been used without his permission.
The arrest of Nekima Levy Armstrong
22 January 2026
“It’s not going to be on Twitter,” said the agent filming the Minneapolis civil rights lawyer Nekima Levy Armstrong, one of the city’s most prominent activists, as she was arrested last Thursday. Within hours, though, it was: the Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem posted a still from the video, in which Armstrong seems composed and shows little emotion.
Half an hour later, the White House X account posted a significantly altered version of the same image: this time, Armstrong is exaggeratedly upset, tears streaming down her face. Her skin tone also appears to have been darkened. The image was captioned: “Arrested: far-left agitator Nekima Levy Armstrong for orchestrating church riots in Minnesota.” In fact, Armstrong was demonstrating at a church service led by an allegedly ICE-affiliated pastor, and was later released without charge.
Until this moment, the White House’s AI-generated output had been conspicuously outlandish: there was little danger of mistaking it for reality. This image purports to be an authentic photograph – or at least omits to mention that it is not. It is not so much AI-generated trolling as an AI-assisted deepfake.
As with Musk’s recently shared Grok tool, which removed women and children’s clothing without their consent, there is also something abusive about it: AI has been used to attempt to humiliate a woman by manipulating her image, to make her look weaker and more distressed than she actually was.
The fact that the deepfakery is not all that convincing is part of the point, de Zeeuw thinks. “What is being communicated here is the falsification itself: you’re showing your ability to falsify images, to falsify evidence.”
After the fakery had been called out, the White House deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr posted the response: “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.”
The Nihilistic Penguin
23 January 2026
In response to this image of Trump and a penguin walking towards a Greenland flag, some observers pointed out that penguins actually live at the south pole. But that’s missing the point of these types of post, says Robert Topinka, a reader in digital media and rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London. “People continue to interpret them as if they’re meant to be a legitimate claim, or an argument or a piece of evidence, but they’re emotional hooks.” Their purpose is to stir up the base. “White House staffers have said they use AI because it’s the fastest way to get content out. It’s not the fastest way to say something that’s true; it’s the fastest way to push their propaganda.”
To those in the know, this is a riff on the “nihilist penguin” meme, which has gone viral on TikTok in the past few weeks. It’s based on a scene from Werner Herzog’s 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World, in which one penguin inexplicably separates from the colony and wanders off towards the Antarctic interior, and certain death. “But why?” Herzog wonders. Many have asked the same of Trump’s quixotic attempts to acquire Greenland.
The image resonates with what Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor christened “end times fascism”, says De Zeeuw, where tech industry leaders and their enablers are almost willing the end of the world as we know it, striding towards oblivion like Trump and his penguin companion. “It’s like they know they’re moving toward the end, but they do so joyfully.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/29/the-slopaganda-era-10-ai-images-posted-by-the-white-house-and-what-they-teach-us
