‘Clever and a little bit offensive’: Inside the White House’s norm-breaking social media strategy

The White House is seen, Monday, Aug. 18, 2025, in Washington.

Official White House social media posts these days can more closely resemble troll-ish meme accounts than a sober dissemination of information from the United States’ highest political office. U.S. President Donald Trump’s White House likes it that way.

Accounts associated with the administration have touted Trump’s landmark policy law using a “Bump It” hair accessory commercial that was popularized around 2010. They’ve shared AI-generated images of Trump as the pope, Superman and a jacked Star Wars character holding a red lightsaber typically wielded by villains in the series. They’ve depicted border czar Tom Homan as the sun from the 1990s children’s show “Teletubbies,” rising over the border wall and talking about deporting undocumented immigrants.

It’s a significant break not only from how past administrations have used social media, but also how Trump’s White House operated online in his first term. Trump himself has defied tradition in huge ways, including online, where he often favors using informal posts to Truth Social to provide details on critical meetings and policies rather than press releases or more official statements. It appears his social media team has at least tacit permission to follow suit — illustrating the Trump administration’s broadly increased comfort with bucking norms.

And the informal-style is starting to seep into other channels: in response to a Politico request for comment this week, the White House responded with a meme referencing the show “Mad Men”.

Trump loyalist and X Strategies CEO Alex Bruesewitz — who runs the Trump War Room and @TeamTrump accounts, which are separate from the White House — said the second-term social media shop “mirrors the president more closely.”

“He changed the game in how you communicate as president. And he’s more transparent, he’s more direct,” Bruesewitz said. “His communication style is also more in touch with the rest of the country. He doesn’t sit there behind a podium and pander and just read a script. He never fails to let the American people know what he’s thinking, exactly how he’s thinking. And he has such a unique communication style, and I think the White House complements it well.”

A source familiar with Trump’s first-term operation said the accounts then were “more polished” and “mostly used for fact sheet and policy-focused content and principal updates.” But the second-term accounts “seem more off-the-cuff and reactionary to the news of the day and leaning into trends.”

Some in Trump’s Cabinet have taken cues as well. JD Vance, the first millennial vice president at 41, engages heavily online. He recently posted an image of himself parodied on South Park with chubby cheeks, declaring on X: “Well, I finally made it.”

In a further sign of its ongoing social media embrace, the White House also launched a TikTok account on Tuesday — despite a law that says ByteDance, the app’s parent company, has to sell to a US buyer or face a ban, and another law that prohibits TikTok on federal government devices. The original sale deadline lapsed in January, and Trump has now extended it several times, most recently to September 17. A day after launching, the account had garnered 177,000 followers.

According to an official, the White House has added over 18 million new followers across platforms since Inauguration Day. Notably, White House social media accounts don’t start from zero — they are passed from administration to administration, while the previous posts then become part of an archive, and the incoming administration inherits the follower count, according to the National Archives.

That White House official said videos on the Facebook and Instagram accounts saw 2.5 billion views and more than 137 million interactions since Trump’s inauguration, and that the core audience came from men aged 25-34 and women 35-44 with “rapidly rising engagement” from Americans aged 18-24.

The administration also boasts over 474,000 new subscribers on YouTube and, after 200 days, 9 million hours of watch time, the official said.

The White House declined to provide information about specific staffers who oversee the social media accounts. But White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement about the general strategy: “There’s a reason so many people try to copy our style — our message resonates.”

Willing to offend

Some of the strategy seems to harken back to the Trump campaign, which sought to appeal to young men and was willing to offend Democrats or other voters considered unlikely to ever support MAGA. The accounts frequently mock Democrats, the media or opponents of Trump and his policies, often using online trends geared toward a younger audience.

White House accounts have reposted TikTok videos of Harris voters upset over Trump’s victory with the caption: “they don’t know it yet, but Trump is making America better for them, their kids and their grandkids.”

Bruesewitz said Democrats in recent years have been “hyper-focused on not offending anybody,” while Republicans “come across as more authentic. It’s more natural for us to be fun and witty and clever and a little bit offensive at times.”

The accounts have also blurred the lines between Trump’s official and private business — another reflection of broader trends in the White House — live-streaming the grand opening ceremony of Trump’s International Golf Links Aberdeen, Scotland.

And the social media strategy shift online goes beyond Trump. Joshua Tucker, co-director of the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics, said there has been a “Tik-Tok-ificaiton” of social media, where text-based posts have been de-emphasized in favor of images, memes and vertical videos that are prioritized by engagement algorithms.

“What you’ve seen is this general movement among politicians, or those that are sort of skillful at doing this, into trying to produce this kind of content,” Tucker said.

But, he added, the Trump administration has shown a willingness to “go against norms that in the past had been generally respected by both prior Republican and Democratic administrations about the appropriate boundaries to draw between official government behavior and partisan behavior.”

While critics in the comments section balk at the juvenile or unprofessional tone of the government accounts, the administration says their social media team is meeting Americans where they are — and boosting engagement in the process. The White House official credited the social media teams as doing “an incredible job hijacking trends to effectively communicate our message.”

“For too long government accounts have remained sterile, carefully crafted spaces where Madison Avenue strategists can flex their muscle for minimal (return on investment) — this administration is committed to meeting the American people where they are and speaking to them how they speak,” the official told CNN.

Taking it seriously

Still, there are some concerns about the long-term effectiveness of the strategy. The person familiar with Trump’s first-term operation cited a video the White House social media accounts posted of the president with the audio of singer Usher’s “Daddy’s Home” — a reference to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte referring to Trump as “daddy” at a recent summit in the Netherlands. The media was ultimately “disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner.”

“I think the current strategy is effective in the sense of quick engagement, but the moment dies fast because it’s reactionary to what the current trend is,” that person said. “My concern is not properly highlighting the policy wins because the feed is bogged down with too many less-serious posts.”

Trump’s own social media posts sometimes blur the lines on what to take seriously.

On Truth Social, Trump announces major policy and personnel changes, provides readouts of his conversations with world leaders, hurls insults at lawmakers and regularly cranks up pressure on officials or institutions, like Fed Chair Jerome Powell or the Smithsonian museums. But he’s also shared an AI video of former President Barack Obama being arrested and jailed — while he was publicly accusing Obama of treason over allegations related to Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“Trump’s amazing ability in his first term, and when he was running for office, was to accumulate a huge number of followers, but also to make his tweets must-see TV for journalists. In this way, he was able to use Twitter to not only reach people directly, but also to set the media narrative,” Tucker said.

The Democratic response

Democrats have amped up efforts to try and compete. In recent weeks, the office of California Gov. Gavin Newsom — a potential 2028 presidential candidate — is taking an antagonistic approach, writing X posts in the style of Trump’s tone on Truth Social, mocking his use of all caps, creation of nicknames like “TINY HANDS,” and penchant for arguing things are rigged against him and Republicans.

“What a Coward and Beta Cuck. @GavinNewsom is too chicken sh*t to take questions from the press after gives an incoherent speech. He’ll never be ready for prime time,” White House communications director Steven Cheung posted from his X account, which will eventually become part of an official archive along with the White House accounts.

Newsom publicly said last week that while he was “pleased” that the account had garnered attention, “I think the deeper question is how have we allowed the normalization of his tweets and Truth Social posts over the course of the last many years to go without similar scrutiny and notice.”

Newsom’s office said that the @GovPressOffice account has surged in followers and impressions since adopting the latest strategy, gaining more than 250,000 followers and more than 225 million impressions since the start of August.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement that she wasn’t surprised that Newsom would “mimic” the president’s “wildly successful communication strategy.”

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but Gavin’s behavior is just getting creepy at this point,” she added.

A source familiar with Biden’s social media operation noted that while officials in his administration took the accounts’ function as a source of public information seriously, they would still fight back against Republicans when they felt they were “taking unfair criticism.”

“It’s not very flashy, but it’s a government account, and its purpose is to inform Americans, regardless if they liked the president or they didn’t like the president,” the source said, adding: “The way I view it, it just kind of seems like a campaign account for the president right now. … They don’t seem to care at all about reaching anyone besides their base of supporters.”

White House officials certainly telegraph that they’re not worried about offending people. In early July, staffers on the White House digital team carried a white poster board out to the driveway on the North Lawn, where many media cameras are set up.

“oMg, diD tHe wHiTE hOuSE reALLy PosT tHis?” the poster said, using a mixed-case font that conveys a mocking tone.

“Nowhere in the Constitution does it say we can’t post banger memes,” the White House accounts posted later that day, with a photograph of the poster.

Cheung added in his own post on X: “A lot of reporters and liberals love to pearl clutch, making being offended part of their entire existence. It’s that type of out-of-touch snobbery that makes everyday Americans laugh at them.”

By Kit Maher, CNN