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Content is the primary unit of the Internet in the 2020s, and it’s not surprising that an administration would embrace it as part of a broader media strategy. What’s been surprising to me is how everyone now seems to think their primary job is to create content. The vice-president’s primary role is to go on X, the Everything App and defend the administration, the transportation secretary spends his time whining that people don’t dress up for flights and say thank you, the treasury secretary does TV hits to create clips to be reposted. It’s an entire administration of posters, headed by a guy who built his own social network to post on after getting banned from other ones.
Because this is an administration of content creators, the primary way to understand what they do isn’t as the creation of policy like a traditional Presidential administration but as a mechanism for the creation of flavored content. They are doing real, heinous things to facilitate the creation of content, and we must be clear about that, but it is always in service of the creation of the content and not durable policy, partially because they aren’t skilled enough to actually create durable change in the system, and also because they’re quite frankly pretty lazy people who just want to be famous.
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It is also difficult to identify this tendency because of how cruel the mechanisms for content creation are.
ICE/CBP are a primary driver of the administration’s content creation machine, and rationalizing the terrorizing of minority communities, the separation of families, and the disappearing of people from the streets as a way to create content feels wrong, but that’s why ICE, when they make their Kavanaugh stops, bring along cameras and push the footage to go viral. There’s an old axiom about the first Trump administration that Adam Serwer penned, “the cruelty is the point”, that seems to have been updated to include as many people seeing the cruelty as possible. They aren’t able to implement actual fascism, so they’re happy to create fascism-flavored content to make their supporters and enemies think they’re doing what they promised. It’s no comfort to the people who have to bear the burden of the creation of this content, but it’s why they hold gleeful photo-ops in El Salvadorian prisons, have tours of prison camps in Florida, and personally throw tear gas at protestors. They’re making content.
I’m writing this now because we’ve just seen the biggest example of the Trump administration doing something for content yet in the removal of Nicolás Maduro as the president of Venezuela. This was a brash action that was undertaken without a plan for the future, and for seemingly unclear reasons. President Trump claimed it was for oil, sure, but the reporting indicates that oil companies don’t have a lot of interest in Venezuelan oil that is difficult to extract after years of neglect and of poor quality. Instead, this was done to create war-flavored content.
https://cooperlund.medium.com/the-trump-flavored-content-administration-ed7aae22d34b?postPublishedType=initialvia
https://balloon-juice.com/2026/01/08/open-thread-the-no-content-administration/
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