DHS, White House Shrug Off Having Their Social Media Lies Pointed Out To Them

from the fake-it-til-you-fash-it dept

It surprises absolutely no one that the Trump administration lies. Trump himself has been lying constantly ever since his first spin in the resolute desk chair. His new administration is right there with him this time around, ensuring we see nothing but a flood of falsehoods all the time.

The administration knows it’s lying. We know it’s lying. It knows that we know it’s lying. And it doesn’t care. The MAGA faithful don’t care that they’re being lied to pretty much all the time. All they care about is how much the messaging aligns with their bigotry and hatred. Everyone else who spots the lies can feel free to point them out, but this administration is living its best life in the post-truth era it has crafted for itself.

The DHS and its underling agencies are fully engaged in lying pretty much all of the time. This concerted effort to avoid the truth has even given Trump himself pause. Sure, it was only a momentary lapse into reason, but earlier this year (right before returning to his plans to invade Portland, Oregon) Trump briefly wondered if he was being misled by the liars he chose to employ. For an extremely tiny amount of time, Trump thought he might be the sucker at the table.

That momentary flash of introspection has yet to return. Constant lying is the name of the game. The administration can’t even be bothered to engage in even the most implausible of deniability when it gets caught lying. There’s no one in the administration blaming the misinformation/disinformation flowing from it on interns or hacked accounts or simply failing to have vetted a social media post before it was posted.

The administration simply does not care. It will post what it wants, even if it’s deliberately misleading. The Washington Post took a look at social media posts by the DHS and uncovered the expected: more lying.

Officials in President Donald Trump’s administration have used […] misleading footage in at least six videos promoting its immigration agenda shared in the last three months, a Washington Post analysis found, muddying the reality of eventsin viral clips that have been viewed millions of times.

Some videos that purported to show the fiery chaos of Trump-targeted cities included footage from completely different states. One that claimed to show dramatic examples of past administrations’ failures instead featured border crossings and smuggling boats recorded during Trump’s first term.

That was the crux of the problem prior to the deployment of National Guard troops to Portland. The violent protests Trump apparently saw and claimed necessitated the use of the military were apparently just b-roll footage of anti-police-violence protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

This is more of the same, except it’s being done by federal employees and officials, rather than by the faux journalists of the Trump-loving Fox News network.

When confronted with these facts, the spokespeople for the DHS and the White House refused to acknowledge the misleading nature of these posts. Instead, they pretended no one had pointed out anything wrong and delivered talking points that talked around what the WaPo journalists were specifically asking them about.

The DHS’s Hanoi Hannah — Tricia McLaughlin — pretended the only problem here was people committing crimes, no matter where or when those crimes were committed.

DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin did not dispute the errors or explain what had happened but said the videos were a small percentage of the more than 400 that the agency has posted this year. “Violence and rioting against law enforcement is unacceptable regardless of where it occurs,” she said.

It’s not just the DHS. It’s also the White House itself.

The White House has made notable errors in its own video operation, posting a video this month that claimed “Chicago is in chaos” and said the city “doesn’t need political spin — it needs HELP.”

The video, however, recycled footage from a months-old ICE operation in Florida, not far from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club. A fact-checker at Agence France-Presse also found other clips in the video had come from operations in Arizona, California, Nebraska, South Carolina and Texas, some of which had been recorded during President Joe Biden’s time in office.

Trust me, these aren’t errors. These are deliberate attempts to mislead the people who view these social media posts.

And these attempts to mislead were tacitly admitted by the White House. Its spokesperson dodged the accusations, preferring to simply state: we’re doing it for the clicks.

Abigail Jackson, a spokeswoman there, did not comment on the errors but said “the Trump administration will continue to highlight the many successes of the president’s agenda through engaging content and banger memes on social media.”

Not a great response! But it plays to the only crowd that matters: Donald Trump. It plays extremely well with the die hard members of his voting bloc — the ones who will wave the Trump flag no matter what he does. It plays well with the rest of the administration, which is as fully cooked as Trump himself. On top of that, there’s a completely cooked Supreme Court waiting to issue shadow docket hand-waves the next time the administration tramples all over people’s rights. After all, it’s fine with using skin color and/or a “Mexican” accent as the basis for a stop, if not an actual arrest.

The DHS can splash whatever it wants all over its social media pages because the only people who care about the truth are those who want to see Trump ejected from office as soon as possible. For everyone else, the truth is just something that gets in the way of a good story.

Filed Under: abigail jackson, cbp, dhs, ice, mass deportation, tricia mclaughlin, trump administration