Oh no, the Trump administration hijacked Uncle Sam
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Oh no, the Trump administration hijacked Uncle Sam
The Trump administration wants you to report people who are in the country illegally, and they’re using one of America’s most beloved national personifications to do it.
The Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, posted a graphic to social media Wednesday using Uncle Sam to encourage Americans to call a tip line for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. The graphic shows Uncle Sam nailing up a poster that reads “Help Your Country… And Yourself…” with text below that says “Report All Foreign Invaders” and a phone number for the ICE hotline.
As has happened before with controversial memes President Donald Trump has shared, the graphic came from a third-party account. The image was sourced by CNN to a pseudonymous X account with “Wake Up White Man” in its bio, and it reached a wider audience when C. Jay Engel, a podcaster who calls himself “Christian nationalist adjacent,” posted it last Friday.
The Trump administration’s term two social media content strategy is one part red meat, another part shock tactics. That’s especially true when it comes to its posts about deportations, like the White House account jumping on an A.I. trend in March with a Studio Ghibli-style recreation of an image of a crying woman being arrested to be deported. The approach taken in an “ASMR” video of people in shackles being deported that the White House posted in February couldn’t be more mean spirited than the YouTube TV-inspired “border zen” ad a pro-Trump super PAC aired during the 2024 race that simply implied a quiet border. As always, the cruelty is the point, but since returning to office, it’s getting louder and more brazen.
Still, there are signs the Trump administration’s aggression is wearing down public support. What some assumed would be a crackdown on criminals they now view as all about numbers, and just 43% of registered voters now approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, a Wednesday Quinnipiac University poll found. A 49% plurality of U.S. adults believe Trump has “gone too far with arrests of immigrants” compared to 40% who believe he hasn’t, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Thursday.
A former strength for Trump has become a weakness, and he admitted as much Thursday when he said his policies had hurt farmers and hospitality workers and it would take “common sense” to find a solution.
The DHS Uncle Sam post would be in poor taste on its own, but in light of increasing disapproval of Trump’s handling of immigration — not to mention Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) being forcibly removed from a DHS press conference this week — what might be dismissed as just a dog whistle sounds more like a foghorn.
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