Governance by Meme

How the Trump Administration Replaced Accountability with Content Creation — While the World Burns

While the Trump administration has been busy auditioning influencers for White House press credentials, running cryptic late-night Instagram stunts, and the bindergate fiasco of recycled Epstein documents to MAGA personalities giddy outside the West Wing, I’m here to remind the MAGA base that the United States is now 26 days into a war with Iran. Missiles are landing on residential buildings in Tehran. Approximately 2,000 vessels and 20,000 seafarers are stranded in the Strait of Hormuz. Fuel rationing has begun in parts of Asia. The Strait, through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil passes, has been militarized into a chokehold on the global economy.

This is not a content news cycle this has the potential to be a civilization-level inflection point.

And the people running the most powerful government on earth are posting cryptic feet videos on instagram.

Phase One: The Binder Stunt

Let’s start at the beginning of this particular strain of mind bending absurdity.

On February 27, 2025, the White House invited a handpicked roster of right-wing social media yes men and women to the West Wing for what was billed as an historic moment for transparency. Out they walked, smiling for the cameras, binders raised overhead with the official seal of the Department of Justice and the label: “The Epstein Files: Phase 1. Declassified.”

The images went viral. The influencers posted immediately.

Photo Credit

The problem? The binders were mostly filled with documents that had been public for years. Epstein’s heavily redacted address book. Old court filings. Material that anyone with a 4Chan account and a spare afternoon had already seen. Conservative commentator Liz Wheeler, one of the binder recipients, went live on X to flip through the pages and essentially confirm the letdown herself.

another thing that struck me is incredibly odd about this moment is the joyous celebration on their faces over one of the darkest elements to exist within America and truly the globe. A network of elite pedophiles, trafficking, children, and sexually assaulting women and God knows what else and they’re holding the binders cheering and celebrating? If that was a real moment for transparency and justice, those people would’ve walked in with heavy hearts. As an individual who is dealt with highly sensitive documents, even declassified documents that’s something that you deal with with a heavy heart, on a serious note, you’re not dancing around with the binder. It was beyond bizarre and highlighted the lack of seriousness within these influencers and how they addressed and understood the information that they were holding and representing in their hands.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican who chairs the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on Declassification, didn’t mince words. She hadn’t seen the documents, hadn’t been briefed, and posted publicly demanding the administration “GET US THE INFORMATION WE ASKED FOR instead of leaking old info to press.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi had set the expectations herself. In a Fox News interview weeks earlier, she told viewers that a Jeffrey Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk right now.” When the binders flopped, Bondi blamed the FBI’s New York office — claiming she hadn’t known thousands of additional documents existed. Trump officials later quietly acknowledged to CNN that the entire rollout “could have been avoided.” One administration official told CNN bluntly that Bondi had “bungled the case from the start” by overpromising. She was also caught on hitting camera talking about it, there was an Epstein case in her district when she was in Florida that was somehow dismissed or forgotten, and she has ties to the church of Scientology, which has a long history of abusing children so for her to be the Epstein file guru is highly suspicious and disturbing.

By July, the DOJ issued a memo walking back the entire client list narrative: And nearly two-thirds of American voters — including more than a third of Republicans — said they disapproved of how the administration had handled the Epstein files, according to a Quinnipiac Poll.

The influencers who’d carried those binders out with such enthusiasm turned on Bondi, after receiving visceral backlash from their loyal followers. Jack Posobiec — one of the chosen ones in the binder group — posted that the entire episode was “incredibly mismanaged” and that they had all been told “more was coming.” Laura Loomer claimed a White House adviser had urged her to “leave Bondi alone” before the criticism became “unsustainable.”

This was Governance by Props, and we were all played.

But wait, there’s more..

Phase Two: The Pentagon Influencer Op

If the binder stunt was theater, what happened at the Pentagon was something darker — the systematic dismantling of independent military press coverage under the guise of “media democratization.”

The professionals were removed, and the puppets were effectively put into place.

In September 2025, Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon required the established press corps to sign a pledge agreeing that “DoW information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official” before publication, a condition media lawyers said would effectively criminalize routine newsgathering, including the use of unnamed sources. Every major outlet refused to sign, from NPR and NBC to The New York Times, Fox News, CBS, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN.

Well, yes, these legacy media organizations have failed us many times over there’s something to be said about the individuals who work there people who are experts, who understand The nuances of war and how to articulate important elements that someone just getting into the pentagon would never have awareness to be able to pick up identify or articulate.

By October 15, 2025, the press corps had walked out en masse, surrendering desks some outlets had held for decades. Leaving empty space in one of the most critical points of in times where we need the most coverage the most information coming out about military movements their silence from the pentagon press corps.

Laura Loomer at a Department of War briefing at the Pentagon in December.

Into that vacuum, Hegseth welcomed an “orientation” of dozens of MAGA-aligned bloggers, commentators, and content creators — many of whom had never covered the Defense Department, many of whom don’t even live in Washington. Former Congressman Matt Gaetz — who had briefly been Trump’s attorney general nominee before allegations tanked the nomination — showed up. So did Laura Loomer. Multiple new credentialed “journalists” posted videos of themselves claiming to be sitting at The Washington Post’s former desk inside the Pentagon. The MAGA circus had officially entered the pentagon.

Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson, who had not held a single on-camera briefing while beat reporters were still in the building, cheerfully hosted one for the new crew. At that first briefing, one of the new credentialed influencers asked Wilson about claims made by Candace Owens regarding an alleged French assassination plot against her. Wilson had no substantive response. Another asked questions using Hegseth’s preferred term “seditious six” to describe Democratic lawmakers.

Real questions — about the legality of lethal drone strikes on drug boats in the Caribbean, about Hegseth’s use of the Signal messaging app to share classified operational information, about rules of engagement with no end date went largely unasked by the new press corps.

Meanwhile, a Pentagon Inspector General report released in December 2025 confirmed that Hegseth had sent “sensitive, non-public, operational information” over Signal. The reporting on that story was led by outlets that had already surrendered their press passes.

The message from the Pentagon was explicit. Deputy Press Secretary Wilson justified the overhaul by saying young people consume news through influencers, and that the Pentagon needed “to reach them too — to let them know about all the incredible things our warfighters are doing.”

This is not journalism. That is a social media content strategy for active military operations on a path of absolute destruction, no end in sight and billions of lives that are being impacted on a much greater scale than hearts, likes, and reposts. Real life is not an algorithm.

Phase Three: Final Nail in the coffin - The Cryptic Feet Video

Last night, the official White House accounts on X and Instagram posted a four-second video filmed on a smartphone, camera pointed at a woman’s feet in pointed shoes with text that read: “sound on.” A female voice asks: “It’s launching soon, right?” A second voice that many observed to sound like Netanyahu partially responds with what sounds like a confirmation.

The posts were deleted roughly 90 minutes after going live. No explanation was given. The White House did not respond to press inquiries.

In the hours before the posts went up, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt had issued a statement warning that if “Iran fails to accept the reality of the current moment,” President Trump “is prepared to unleash hell.”

The internet, predictably, spiraled. A million and a half comments speculated: nuclear strike? Another Iran bombardment? A product launch? A hack? Was it Leavitt’s feet? What exactly is launching soon?

This is the logical endpoint of an administration that has governed as a content machine for last two years. The White House has posted AI-generated images of Trump as the pope and as a jacked Star Wars character wielding a Sith lightsaber. They posted Tom Homan as the Teletubbies sun rising over the border wall. They used Sabrina Carpenter’s music over footage of ICE agents pursuing immigrants without permission, and when Carpenter responded on X that the video was “evil and disgusting,” the White House retorted with a pun on her album title and kept the post up.

The White House boasts that its Facebook and Instagram content has generated 2.5 billion views and over 137 million interactions since Inauguration Day. The core audience: men aged 25–34 and women 35–44.

These are not vanity metrics. They are the architecture of a parallel reality, one in which every policy failure becomes a meme opportunity, every crisis becomes a content cycle, and actual consequences can be buried beneath the next viral moment.

The War Behind the Posts

Here is what is happening while the Trump administration manages its brand:

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes against Iran. The surprise attack came during active nuclear negotiations , diplomacy that Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi had described just three days earlier as presenting a “historic” opportunity to avert military conflict. Araghchi had publicly stated Iran held a “crystal clear” position against nuclear weapons development and was committed to talks.

The strikes killed the Supreme Leader, Iranian officials, and civilians. In retaliation, Iran launched hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles at targets in Israel and at U.S. military bases across Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the UAE. A drone struck Britain’s Akrotiri military base on Cyprus. Iranian strikes have hit civilian infrastructure in multiple nations, luxury hotels in Dubai, and damaged Dubai International Airport, one of the world’s busiest, forcing a temporary halt to all flights.

As of today, over a thousand people have been killed in Lebanon alone as hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah have re-escalated. NATO air defense systems intercepted Iranian missiles near Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base. A US Navy submarine sank an Iranian frigate in the Indian Ocean. Shipping lines have rerouted to avoid both the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. The conflict, according to analysts at the Atlantic Council, has “extended far beyond the Middle East” — fracturing Western alliances, putting China, India, and Russia into play as “key variables in international diplomacy,” and disrupting global energy markets in ways that will take years to fully calculate.

The United Kingdom’s foreign policy establishment has drawn explicit comparisons to the 2003 Iraq invasion. European leaders are divided. Gulf allies including Oman, Qatar, and Turkey, countries Iran has also struck, are alarmed. Multiple mediators have attempted to broker talks. According to CNN, “the maximum Iran might be willing to give does not meet the minimum the US is demanding.”

Meanwhile, press secretary Leavitt assured reporters that “talks continue” and “they are productive.”

A thousand U.S. soldiers from the 82nd Airborne are staging to deploy.

What Real Leadership Would Look Like

The tragedy of this moment is not simply that these particular men and women are governing irresponsibly. It is that genuine diplomatic resolution was, and may still be, possible and it requires exactly the kind of leadership this administration has demonstrated it cannot provide.

Real leadership in this moment would mean sitting down without preconditions — not capitulation, not surrender, but genuine multilateral engagement that includes the voices of Qatar, Turkey, Oman, the EU, China, and Russia in a structured framework. It would mean an American executive capable of checking its ego at the door long enough to recognize that lasting security agreements require the participation of every significant party to the conflict, including those whose interests diverge sharply from Washington’s.

It would mean a president who does not issue nuclear ultimatums via Truth Social. It would mean a secretary of defense who does not prioritize his brand over the safety of the press corps whose job it is to tell the American public whether their sons and daughters are being sent into a legally sound operation. It would mean an administration capable of understanding that the perception of strength and the projection of actual strategic wisdom are not the same thing.

Instead, we have an administration that gave binders of recycled documents to influencers to perform transparency. That replaced the Pentagon press corps with bloggers asking about Candace Owens conspiracy theories. That posted a woman’s feet and the words “sound on” to its official government accounts in the middle of an active war, and then deleted it without explanation.

Billions of people are living with the downstream consequences of decisions made in Washington. The price of their oil, the rerouting of their shipping lanes, the possibility that this regional conflict spirals into something no one — not the analysts at RAND, not the mediators in Oman, not the diplomats in Brussels — can fully contain.

Those people deserve more than click bate content.

They deserve leaders.

Sources:

∙ CBS News, “Right-wing influencers get binders labeled ‘The Epstein Files’” (Feb. 27, 2025)

∙ Axios, “White House briefs conservative influencers on Epstein files” (Feb. 27, 2025)

∙ PBS NewsHour, “Epstein client list doesn’t exist, DOJ says” (July 7, 2025)

∙ CNN, “Epstein files: Annoyance at Bondi’s handling grows” (July 8, 2025)

∙ The New Republic, “Remember Trump’s Influencers on the Epstein Files? They’re Pissed” (July 7, 2025)

∙ NPR, “The press corps at the Defense Department has been replaced by far-right outlets” (Dec. 3, 2025)

∙ CNN, “New York Times sues Hegseth over Pentagon press crackdown” (Dec. 4, 2025)

∙ European Security & Defence, “Pentagon convenes pro-Trump press corps” (Dec. 4, 2025)

∙ CNBC, “White House posts cryptic videos, deletes one” (March 26, 2026)

∙ Newsweek, “White House Instagram Posts Spark Questions” (March 25, 2026)

∙ NBC News, “Trump administration leans in on memes, AI and MAGA messaging online” (July 24, 2025)

∙ CNN, “Inside the White House’s norm-breaking social media strategy” (Aug. 24, 2025)

∙ NPR, “How the Trump administration is using social media content to govern” (Jan. 16, 2026)

∙ TIME, “Artists Push Back Against Trump Admin Using Their Music” (Dec. 3, 2025)

∙ Britannica, “2026 Iran War” (March 25, 2026)

∙ Wikipedia, “2026 Iran War”; “Prelude to the 2026 Iran conflict”

∙ Al Jazeera, “US-Israel war on Iran: What’s happening on day 26” (March 25, 2026)

∙ Al Jazeera, “Geopolitical analysis of the imposed war against Iran” (March 10, 2026)

∙ CNN, “Obstacles to ending war come into focus” (March 25, 2026)

∙ Atlantic Council, “Experts react: How the world is responding to the US-Israeli war with Iran”

∙ RAND, “Iran’s Escalation Strategy Won’t Work” (March 16, 2026)

∙ Fortune, “More than 7,400 influencers apply for White House press credentials” (Jan. 31, 2025)