After the official White House X account was caught posting a digitally altered photo, one of President Donald Trump's spokespeople responded not by apologizing, but by mocking fact-checkers.
On Thursday, CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale called attention to a post by the White House in which federal agents were seen arresting a protester in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the photo posted by the Trump White House, the protester was seen crying. But the actual photo shows the protester wearing a stoic expression while being handcuffed.
"Asked for comment, the White House sent a link to a spokesperson’s X post that said, 'Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue,'" Dale wrote.
The X post that Dale referenced appears to be from Kaelan Dorr, who is a deputy assistant to the president and a White House deputy communications director. White House deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson responded to Dorr's post with a meme in which a Wojak (an MS Paint-generated figure often used in far-right memes) dubbed "the deboonker" is seen holding a coffee mug bearing the logo for fact-checking website Snopes and uttering phrases like "fake," "straw man argument" and "source??"
"uM, eXCuSe mE??? iS tHAt DiGiTAlLy AlTeReD?!?!?!?!?!” Jackson tweeted in the alternating-capitalization style of the Mocking Spongebob meme.
Jackson's comment was widely mocked on social media by various journalists and commentators. NPR investigative correspondent Tom Dreisbach wrote: "I expect to see this post from a White House spokeswoman cited by the defense in court filings." MS NOW host Chris Hayes argued that Jackson and other White House communications staffers have "terminal brain worms."
"These people are morons," attorney Benjamin Kabak wrote on Bluesky. "We are governed by morons who think the federal government is a literal joke."
"There are people out there who'd be better off sniffing paint than being on social media," quipped University of California-Riverside assistant professor Stan Oklobdzija.
"No wonder their polls are plummeting: all their messaging is aimed at about 20,000 extremely online Nazis," wrote the Village Voice's Roy Edroso.
"These people are depraved," author and podcaster Sarah Posner wrote.
