Some days the show is a prison drama: A mass of prisoners assemble under the watch of an authority. Some days it’s a police procedural: Protagonists in uniform conduct raids on dark city streets. Some days it’s a western: A figure in a cowboy hat patrols on horseback, keeping an eye on the wild frontier.
The show has many forms, but it is all one production — the social-media feed of the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem. Since she took office in January, the secretary’s online video presence has been helping a media-minded administration broadcast images of unsparing domination with a telegenic face.
Ms. Noem’s social feed drew wide notice last week when she posted a 33-second video 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 on her wrist, she warns that “if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face.”
There are other people in the video too. Though Ms. Noem uses the word “terrorists,” we do not know their history; legal cases and reporting have questioned the charges of gang membership against some El Salvador detainees, and the administration has acknowledged deporting at least one man in error.
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.
The video sent a stark message, if not a universally lauded one. 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 “The Apprentice,” told top aides that they should approach every day 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 “look the part.”
The secretary’s 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.’s most camera-ready stars as governor of South Dakota, she changed her manner and even her look 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.
She goes out with ICE, wearing a police vest and declaring, like Andy Sipowicz in “NYPD Blue,” “We are getting the dirt bags off these streets.” She dons a U.S. Customs and Border Protection hat and jacket in a post announcing “America is CLOSED to law breakers.”
Ms. Noem is only one of the administration staffers carrying out the president’s 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 in the gym and meeting with the mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor, underscoring his feed’s recurrent theme of politicized hypermasculinity.
The official White House account is rife with boasting and taunting posts, many drawing on meme formats from the dank corners of the internet. One post mimicked “A.S.M.R.” videos, 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, depicting Mr. Trump, JD Vance and Elon Musk as dancing pallbearers carrying a casket marked with the logo of the United States Agency for International Development.
Ms. Noem’s department is at the center of one of the administration’s most visible publicity pushes, on the issue — immigration — on which Mr. Trump currently polls best. 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.
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.
In another set of posts, Ms. Noem sits and rifles through printed mug shots of people she calls “scumbags” — mostly men of color — arrested on charges of violent and sexual crimes; it’s as if “America’s Most Wanted” were remade in the form of a YouTube unboxing video. Another produced clip, with intercut black-and-white arrest images and an ominous soundtrack, could come from a true-crime documentary.
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 — the border, back alleys, a Coney Island subway station — to stop them.
The images speak of a dramatic enforcement blitz and a stark turnaround at the border, though the number of crossings had been dropping before Mr. Trump took office. The Biden administration sometimes posted enforcement videos, too, but it was not as ubiquitous in publicizing its border policy.
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’s videos borrows from terrorism dramas, crime dramas — the kinds of stories, like “24,” that have in the past suggested that personal liberties and due process can get in the way of safety.
Sometimes the images are grim, sometimes chipper, often a disconcerting blend of the two. There is a stylized dystopian vibe to the project overall — 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.
But the secretary’s 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.
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’s feed, there is one repeated message that cuts through as much as any about arrests or threats or “dirt bags.” It is this: “Thank you, @POTUS.”
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