Washington D.C. – September 9, 2025 – The Trump governance is escalating it’s deployment of federal law enforcement to Democratic-led cities, sparking accusations of authoritarianism and constitutional overreach. The move follows weeks of rhetoric from President Trump regarding crime rates and immigration, framed increasingly through a strategy critics are calling “memetic warfare.”
The Department of Homeland Security announced Monday the launch of “Operation Midway Blitz,” a surge of immigration law enforcement in Chicago. This action builds on previous targeting of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., cities also under Democratic control. Trump has stated the deployments are intended to combat crime and execute mass deportations.
The administration’s approach has been characterized by the use of pop culture-inspired memes, often featuring AI-generated imagery of Trump in various heroic roles, alongside provocative content. this tactic, described as “I’m kidding but not really,” aims to normalize potentially alarming actions by presenting them as harmless jokes. When California Governor Gavin Newsom employed a similar trolling strategy against republicans, the response was markedly different then the administration’s reaction to criticism.During a recent exchange with NBC News’ Yamiche Alcindor on the South Lawn of the White House, Trump dismissed her question about a meme as “fake news,” and interrupted her attempts to respond, stating, “Be quiet, listen! You don’t listen! You never listen. That’s why you’re second-rate.” He then pivoted to discussing crime reduction, asserting, “We’re not going to war. We’re gonna clean up our cities.”
Despite high murder rates in cities like New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis, Trump has focused enforcement efforts on cities governed by Democrats. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson responded to the impending federal intervention on social media, writing, “The president’s threats are beneath the honor of our nation, but the reality is that he wants to occupy our city and break our Constitution, we must defend our democracy from this authoritarianism by protecting each other and protecting Chicago from Donald Trump.”
Critics have pointed to the administration’s strategy as a form of “memetic warfare,” where a manufactured ecosystem presents potentially risky policies as innocuous humor. Opponents argue that this tactic deflects legitimate concerns and normalizes authoritarian tendencies.