\n<\/p>\n
Some days the show is a prison drama: A mass of prisoners assemble under the watch<\/a> of an authority. Some days it\u2019s a police procedural: Protagonists in uniform conduct raids on dark city streets<\/a>. Some days it\u2019s a western: A figure in a cowboy hat patrols on horseback<\/a>, keeping an eye on the wild frontier.<\/p>\n The show has many forms, but it is all one production \u2014 the social-media feed of the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem. Since she took office in January, the secretary\u2019s online video presence has been helping a media-minded administration broadcast images of unsparing domination with a telegenic face.<\/p>\n Ms. Noem\u2019s social feed drew wide notice last week when she posted a 33-second video<\/a> from a Salvadoran prison where the administration has been sending detainees. Dressed in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement cap and active-wear, a $50,000 Rolex watch<\/a> on her wrist, she warns that \u201cif you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face.\u201d<\/p>\n There are other people in the video too. Though Ms. Noem uses the word \u201cterrorists,\u201d we do not know their history; legal cases and reporting<\/a> have questioned the charges<\/a> of gang membership against some El Salvador detainees, and the administration has acknowledged deporting at least one man in error<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The figures behind Ms. Noem are not so neatly or expensively styled but they also convey an aesthetic message. The men, many of them shirtless, are crowded, teeming, sitting and standing, seemingly at attention, to face the camera from behind bars. Ms. Noem, the image says, is literally standing between them and you. They are objects, warnings, a forbidding wallpaper of fear and subjugation.<\/p>\n The video sent a stark message, if not a universally lauded one<\/a>. As with all things Trump, however, the video seems meant to appeal to one viewer above all. Before he took office for his first term, President Trump, the former host of \u201cThe Apprentice,\u201d told top aides that they should approach every day<\/a> as if it were an episode of a TV show, in which their goal was to win. He also had a preference, then and now, for underlings who perform well on camera and \u201clook the part.\u201d<\/p>\n The secretary\u2019s videos take care to make her look the part, dress the part and play the part against scenic backdrops. Long one of the G.O.P.\u2019s most camera-ready stars as governor of South Dakota, she changed her manner and even her look<\/a> as the MAGA movement took over the party. Now, as the face of its immigration-enforcement project, she wears and is framed by accouterments of inviolable authority.<\/p>\n She goes out with ICE, wearing a police vest and declaring<\/a>, like Andy Sipowicz in \u201cNYPD Blue,\u201d \u201cWe are getting the dirt bags off these streets.\u201d She dons a U.S. Customs and Border Protection hat and jacket<\/a> in a post announcing \u201cAmerica is CLOSED to law breakers.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ms. Noem is only one of the administration staffers carrying out the president\u2019s combat-by-video mandate. The secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, a former Fox TV host, loads his X feed with images of himself working out<\/a> in the gym and meeting<\/a> with the mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor<\/a>, underscoring his feed\u2019s recurrent theme of politicized hypermasculinity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The official White House account is rife with boasting and taunting posts<\/a>, many drawing on meme formats from the dank corners of the internet. One post<\/a> mimicked \u201cA.S.M.R.\u201d videos,<\/a> luxuriating in the sounds of chains and whirring jet engines as it showed a deportation flight readying to depart. The Republican-controlled House Foreign Affairs Committee joined in as well, posting a takeoff on a long-lived meme<\/a>, depicting Mr. Trump, JD Vance and Elon Musk as dancing pallbearers<\/a> carrying a casket marked with the logo of the United States Agency for International Development.<\/p>\n Ms. Noem\u2019s department is at the center of one of the administration\u2019s most visible publicity pushes, on the issue \u2014 immigration \u2014 on which Mr. Trump currently polls best<\/a>. Her account often posts clips from conservative-media outfits including Fox News; her own in-house videos, in turn, provide fodder and B-roll for the same such segments<\/a>.<\/p>\n Her feed deploys the tropes and techniques of various TV and social-media genres in miniature. In the horseback video, she is shot from ground level, speaking over her shoulder with mounted agents in the background, calling on an entire library of filmic images of cavalry and posses riding off to tame lawlessness.<\/p>\n In another set of posts, Ms. Noem sits<\/a> and rifles<\/a> through printed mug shots of people she calls \u201cscumbags\u201d \u2014 mostly men of color \u2014 arrested on charges of violent and sexual crimes; it\u2019s as if \u201cAmerica\u2019s Most Wanted\u201d were remade in the form of a YouTube unboxing video. Another produced clip<\/a>, with intercut black-and-white arrest images and an ominous soundtrack, could come from a true-crime documentary.<\/p>\n The message is of ubiquitous danger. The videos collectively say that criminals, gang members and other predators want to slip in through every crack, and that Ms. Noem and the administration are here, there, everywhere \u2014 the border, back alleys, a Coney Island subway station<\/a> \u2014 to stop them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The images speak of a dramatic enforcement blitz and a stark turnaround at the border, though the number of crossings had been dropping<\/a> before Mr. Trump took office. The Biden administration sometimes posted enforcement videos<\/a>, too, but it was not as ubiquitous in publicizing its border policy.<\/p>\n If a picture is worth a thousand words, it may be that a picture also conveys the impression of a thousand arrests. The aesthetic of the Trump administration\u2019s videos borrows from terrorism dramas, crime dramas \u2014 the kinds of stories, like \u201c24,\u201d that have in the past suggested that personal liberties and due process can get in the way of safety.<\/p>\n Sometimes the images are grim, sometimes chipper, often a disconcerting blend of the two. There is a stylized dystopian vibe to the project overall \u2014 though whether Ms. Noem is fending off a dystopia (of swarming invaders who want to attack and plunder America) or ushering in a dystopia (of airbrushed propaganda and cheerful brutality) is in the eye of the beholder.<\/p>\n But the secretary\u2019s publicity efforts so far show how she, like other members of the administration, has internalized the key elements of the Trump media ethos. First, that governing and power require potent images that end-around analysis and go for the primal. Second, that those images require a camera-ready presenter.<\/p>\n And finally, that in the rolling TV production that is the Trump administration, there is one protagonist, executive producer and star who must get top billing. When you go through the Ms. Noem\u2019s feed, there is one<\/a> repeated<\/a> message<\/a> that cuts through as much as any about arrests or threats or \u201cdirt bags.\u201d It is this: \u201cThank you, @POTUS.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n