John Rash: Don't squander US credibility with squalid memes

For 15 years, Politico had annually named its “Lie of the Year.”

But by December of last year the deceit was so unceasing that the publication named 2025 “The Year of Lies.”

PolitiFact’s Editor-in-Chief Katie Sanders explained the shift by writing, “The concept of truth feels particularly bleak in 2025.” Online forums, she wrote, teem with “artificial intelligence-generated slop that incites rage.” Fabrications from chatbots get folded “into a report card on America’s health” and government leaders “deploy up-is-down narratives at an exhausting clip.”

And after just six weeks, 2026 looks even worse.

Including an incident in Minnesota on Jan. 22, when a photo of the arrest of attorney and activist Nekima Levy Armstrong was posted on X by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and shared by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. In the image, Levy Armstrong, accused of interrupting a St. Paul church service to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Operation Metro Surge, shows her walking in front of a law-enforcement officer, looking straight ahead.

But just half an hour hence the White House posted a different version. In this image, Levy Armstrong isn’t composed, but coming apart, sobbing. And according to a New York Times image analysis, Levy Armstrong, who is Black, has had her skin darkened.

When the Times asked about the discrepancy, the White House wasn’t defensive but defiant, pointing to a post on X from the deputy communications director that read:

“Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.” Which means the presidential prevarication will, too.

This includes shifting stories about another mean meme: the parody video President Donald Trump reposted that included the racist image of the faces of former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama over the cartoon bodies of apes.

Even loyal Republicans recoiled, including the Senate’s only Black Republican, Tim Scott. He hoped the post was fake, the South Carolinian wrote on X, “because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” (And maybe any since 1915, when Woodrow Wilson made the racist “The Birth of a Nation” the first film screened in the White House.)

The phony photo of Levy Armstrong is “appalling,” Jane Kirtley, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law, said in an interview. “It’s not as if government’s failure to be candid or lies by omission have never been done before, but I think the Trump administration has taken it to a new level.”

Just as the administration did during its first term, when the Washington Post counted 30,573 false or misleading claims — with nearly half coming in its final year.

The last 10 years, wrote PolitiFact’s Sanders, “have been an ugly era for facts, marked by a drumbeat of untruths and near-constant charges of ‘fake news’ from the decade’s most influential player, President Donald Trump.”

But the trouble with drumbeats, she wrote, “is, as a matter of survival or sanity, we tend to tune out or grow numb to them. Even people with influence who might lament ‘misinformation’ move on to other fights. The word itself is downgraded — at best it’s a red flag, at worst it’s a punchline.”

Perhaps that’s what the administration intends. If so, that denigrates, even endangers, democracy.

That’s the view of another scholar of media and politics, Natalie Jomini Stroud, the founder and director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Media Engagement.

Incidents like the Levy Armstrong photo “are alarming,” Jomini Stroud said in an interview. Especially since research reflects that images “[affect] people profoundly because they interpret the information not only visually but also they record it in their brain more centrally than just words. It has the ability to affect what people are thinking about this particular instance and about the issue overall.”

And, added Jomini Stroud, commenting on the deceptive Levy Armstrong photo, “by tweaking visuals, you’re also tweaking things that can embed in people’s memory to a greater extent than a textual summary.”

The government, said the U’s Kirtley, operates from a “preferential position” as gatekeepers of information. “There’s a compact between the public and the government, and it’s based on operating in good faith, and [the altered photo] is not good faith.”

Nor was there good faith in the administration’s characterization of the tragic killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents.

Like when Noem labeled Pretti a “domestic terrorist” with a motive “to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.”

But these and other false administration claims quickly came apart, undone by authentic, not artificial, images from eyewitnesses, causing rejection — revulsion, even — from many, including Pretti’s family, who said in a statement: “The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting.”

The “initial administrative response to this is now in conflict with what the majority of public opinion believes happened,” said Stroud, who added that the inconsistency “is a danger for the administration from just a tactical political perspective” but more profoundly presents “a danger to the country” that’s consequential “for how society functions and how government is able to serve the interests of the public.”

And the consequences can span continents, impacting international issues.

The Trump administration, for instance, has used images to justify striking alleged Venezuelan drug boats. And half a world away, an armada of U.S. naval vessels threatens the theocracy in Tehran over its potential nuclear program — claims that may have to be geopolitically justified by images deemed credible.

Sowing uncertainty through juvenile memes can mean intended international audiences for such vital visual evidence may undercut U.S. legitimacy on what can literally become a life-or-death issue.

“We are seeing now, increasingly, the power of AI to make it challenging for us to discern truth from falsehood, and I think that anyone who is concerned about politics and the way we communicate about politics needs to be thinking very carefully about how do we put safeguards in place so that the public has a better understanding of what is AI-generated and what is not,” Jomini Stroud rightly said.

Indeed, protecting the public from politicians’ use of visuals to eviscerate the truth will likely require safeguards that are high-tech and cutting-edge.

But nothing will be better than an already available, no-tech, timeless tool: telling the truth.

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