Sadism Saturates Trump’s America
The White House posted an AI-altered picture of an ICE protester under arrest, made to look like she was sobbing remorsefully. The episode reveals something deeply disturbing about the unrestrained sadism of MAGA and this moment in American politics.
The White House posted a fake image of a protester sobbing while being arrested. The MAGA movement is so in love with retribution that it will entertain itself by torturing a digital voodoo doll of the political enemy. (Secretary Kristi Noem / The White House via X)
On Thursday morning, amid continuing unrest in the Twin Cities after the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) killing of Renee Good, the Trump White House posted an artificial intelligence–altered image of an anti-ICE protester in police custody. The original image shows Nekima Levy Armstrong being led away in handcuffs, her face stoic. The image spread by the Trump administration, on the other hand, shows her face twisted in anguish, mouth open mid-cry, tears streaming down her cheeks. Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem had posted the original just one hour prior.
Levy Armstrong had participated in a protest that Sunday that disrupted a local church service. A pastor at the church, David Easterwood, is listed in court documents as the acting St Paul field director for ICE. Armstrong herself is an ordained reverend. Speaking about the protesters’ rationale prior to her arrest, she said, “When you think about the federal government unleashing barbaric ICE agents upon our community and all the harm that they have caused, to have someone serving as a pastor who oversees these ICE agents, is almost unfathomable to me.”
A Guardian analysis of the two photos confirmed that the one posted by the White House is a digitally altered version of the one posted by Noem. When asked for comment, the White House pointed to an X post by a White House communications official, who stated, “The memes will continue.” The response glibly suggested that the image was meant to be recognized as fake and humorous, when in fact it was presented without commentary as a real photograph of an actual event.
Under the White House’s X post of the altered photo, the reactions were split between commenters highlighting that it was fake and commenters for whom the altered image had the intended effect. The latter cohort relished her imaginary misery.
Florida congressman Randy Fine replied, “Cry away, terrorist.” Commenters unleashed a firehose of giddy sadism. Levy Armstrong’s offense was disrupting a service at a church where a man responsible for ICE abuses serves as a pastor, an effort to highlight religious hypocrisy. The commenters further underscored her point, as the most purportedly Christian among them evinced the most perverse enjoyment.
“Dirty b—,” said one whose bio pronounced that “Christ is king.” “Cry hard b—,” commented one whose bio asked the Lord to hear his prayer — his prayer being, presumably, that people who object to instances of brutality that he supports should suffer in public for his own entertainment.
The Trump White House is dialed into the collective consciousness of its loyal MAGA base. And that base had just spent the previous two weeks asserting that Renee Good got what she deserved, whether for mouthing off, or for failing to obey ICE’s conflicting commands, or for frightening agent Jonathan Ross into thinking he might be hit by her vehicle. A new postmortem analysis reveals that Good was likely killed by the third of Ross’s three bullets, which entered her left temple through the driver’s side window and exited the right side of her head, an execution carried out from a position of uncontested physical safety. “F—ing b—,” Ross said as he turned his back on Good’s uncontrolled car, still sailing down the street, and walked away unharmed.
The MAGA base watched this murder occur in real time and reacted with vindictive delight. A new movement motto that had begun as a murmur in the fall exploded into a battle cry: “FAFO,” meaning “F— Around and Find Out.” The restraints have fallen away in the second administration; the strong have reinherited the earth, and the meek challenge the mighty at their peril. When the White House posted that altered image of Levy Armstrong, they were aiming precisely to generate a maximum FAFO response in their base. This is a movement so in love with retribution that it will entertain itself by torturing a digital voodoo doll of the political enemy.
The fact that Levy Armstrong did not actually engage in a real public display of anguished remorse and humiliating weakness ultimately mattered little. What mattered is that, for the MAGA faithful, it felt sublime to encounter the visual stimulus of the enemy in maximal pain, punished for overestimating her own power. The Trump administration and base are engaged in an energetic, quasi-spiritual process of mass libidinal release. The altered photo of Nekima Levy Armstrong was not a “meme,” as the White House claimed. It was revenge porn for the MAGA goon cave.
Sadism Ascendant
When Renee Good was killed, I ended up back in the bowels of X, a platform I’d mostly abandoned in recent years because my life is not enriched by frequent close encounters with the dark heart of man. After days of immersion in collective forensic investigation of grainy murder footage and a shot of the most concentrated anti-lesbian sentiment over Good that I, an out lesbian for over two decades, have ever encountered in my life, I texted a friend in despair. My ideas about political strategy are all predicated on a tragically naive misunderstanding of humanity, I lamented, confessing a degree of hopelessness. These people are too far gone, and there are too many of them. I’m just not sure how we make it out.
My friend, an American who lives abroad and is better insulated from the acute mental effects of domestic politics, advised that I resist exceptionalizing this moment. There have been other movements in American history that desired nothing more than to make the enemy scream. There was Redemption, the backlash to black Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War, which saw the rise of Ku Klux Klan terror and the nightmarish campaign of lynchings. There was the era of “massive resistance” to segregation, where black schoolchildren were subjected to collective ridicule by jeering mobs of spite-drunk adults and protesters were beaten with bats, chains, and pipes. The Jim Crow South was replete with sundown towns where a black person traveling at night took their life into their own hands; to linger was to FAFO.
This hall of horrors was somehow comforting, suggesting as it did that our civilization may not be careening once and for all beyond rescue so much as experiencing a cyclical release of dark energies, like the belching of subterranean gases from the mantle of the earth. What vexes me still, though, is the role of emerging digital technologies in the timeless landscape of resurgent political sadism.
On the one hand, we can be relieved that the hateful mob has migrated largely into digital space. Twisting a photographic image into a fake cry of pain is certainly preferable to inducing that cry in the amphitheater of the lynch mob. On the other hand, the brutality continues in the real world, as the many instances of ICE violence and intimidation make perfectly clear, and these digital depravities encourage them. People in power indulge in open cruelty, bring scalps to their base for bragging rights, watch in satisfaction as their supporters erupt into paroxysms of malicious ecstasy, and emerge reinforced and determined to up the ante again in the real world.
These temptations harmonize better with the domination- and authority-focused politics of the Right and are therefore more easily and shamelessly indulged among them. But online is a place where mass feeling quickly distorts and overwhelms individual thinking, and where concentrated subcultures magically transfigure private vices into public virtues. That’s true for everyone. The siren song of online political sadism is very loud, and the Left is hardly immune. A small segment of leftists entertained a thrill at the murder of Charlie Kirk. While a few examples were downright obscene, most who caved to this temptation sounded the ostentatiously unsentimental note of “well, he asked for it.” In other words, he f—ed around and found out.
Still, something is happening on the Right that is unique to that movement. What started as cheeky “vice signaling,” intended to signal toughness and needle the woke, has devolved into an entirely new permission structure, a revolutionary departure from the moral consensus. It is not only allowed but righteous, FAFO says, to enjoy hurting others, to relish their humiliation and domination, to take open delight in their suffering. Despite being religiously unjustifiable, it has a certain religious quality to it — the rapture of ethical disinhibition.
Because the internet is an unprecedented transmitter of contagious perverse affect, the rest of us risk becoming more like them. The Right is making American politics the most mercilessly dehumanizing and joyously cruel than it’s ever been in our lifetimes, and the internet beckons us all to participate. This moment presents us with many demanding political tasks, but one gets short shrift: we must resist the invitation to easy sadism.