A fake presidency, with real fascism

[marmar]

“The memes will continue”: A fake presidency, but real tyranny
Trump's lazy, crumbling regime values viral AI memes more than actual policy. But the brutality is real

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published January 25, 2026 9:00AM (EST)


(Salon) This past week, the Trump White House posted an image on social media that appeared to show Nekima Levy Armstrong, a lawyer who was arrested after an anti-ICE demonstration in Minnesota, weeping helplessly after being handcuffed. It was a blatant fake. Only minutes earlier, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem had posted the original photo of Armstrong’s arrest, in which she appears calm, even resolute.

After the New York Times confronted White House officials with evidence that the second image had been “digitally altered,” probably using a generative AI tool such as Gemini or Grok, deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr responded with a post on X: “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.” You could almost hear the high-fives being exchanged; you could almost smell the medium-high-end hair products and lily of the valley-scented body spray.

That extraordinary statement says, or reveals, much more than it intends to, and even amid the relentless onslaught of lies, abuses, perversions of justice and outright criminality perpetrated by the Trump regime, it merits closer attention. The memes will continue. That should be the official motto of this relentlessly fake but genuinely terrifying presidency, holographically emblazoned in the air above the half-demolished White House, in the same Hilton Garden Inn-style typeface now used to identify the Oval Office.

....(snip)....

But the “law” supposedly being enforced by Trump’s brutal, clownish and cowardly thugs in Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities to come is just as egregiously fake as last week’s image of an AI-slop Trump planting an AI-slop flag in an AI-slop Greenland. The damage being inflicted on human lives and American communities is all too real, of course, and the Kristallnacht-style terror now directed against all perceived or suspected immigrants (and against Black and brown people in general) is an important policy goal in itself. ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/01/25/the-memes-will-continue-a-fake-presidency-but-real-tyranny/

[leftstreet]

1. DURec