Split Screen: ‘MySafeSpace’ and the Collapse of whitehouse.gov

Visual language is never neutral. It shapes our subconscious understanding of power, legitimacy, and identity.

The White House website is supposed to be the digital front door to our government, a place where Americans can seek information, watch official briefings, review policies, and generally understand what their leaders are doing and how their taxpayer dollars are being spent.

The White House’s official social media pages have been rife with offensive trolling and memes since the outset, which, as a Trump loyalist described, “mirrors the president more closely.” In another profound swerve from political norms and just plain decency, the White House this month published a parody page titled “MySafeSpace.” Styled like a 2000s MySpace profile, the page features doctored images of Democratic officials, including a photoshopped sombrero and mustache on House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), an unflattering image of an unnamed Black woman labeled “Fenty Girl” (presumably a reference to Rihanna’s clothing and beauty lines), a “Maryland Dad” who looks like one of the thousands of Latinos ripped from their families and deported, and, although this White House routinely weaponizes its purported fight against antisemitism, a deliberately unflattering photo of George Soros, directly stoking stereotypes about Jews controlling the government.

These are just a few of the racist, sexist, and conspiratorial jokes masquerading as parody. The background is a tiled field of cartoon sombreros. The page links to a fake video, likely AI‑generated, of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Jeffries trick‑or‑treating through the White House while a mashup of the “Monster Mash” plays. Using deepfake video on a government website is not just inappropriate; it’s destabilizing. When the White House embraces synthetic media to mock political opponents, it signals to the public that fabricated visuals are now part of the information ecosystem.

This is not satire. This is not clever political messaging. This is the executive branch weaponizing its official communications channels to mock opponents, degrade public trust, and transform the people’s website into a partisan playground while exploiting discriminatory and degrading tropes for entertainment.

As someone who analyzes the visuals of power, and who took very seriously my own videos hosted by the official whitehouse.gov domain during the Biden-Harris administration, I’m stunned. And I’m alarmed.

Because what’s happening here is not just juvenile. It’s authoritarian.

We cannot let the White House website become a meme page.

The page’s structure follows MySpace’s layout: a profile photo, a “Top 8 Friends” list, glittery graphics, and GIFs. But that’s where its similarity to adolescent nostalgia ends. Jeffries’ profile photo shows him in a crudely added sombrero and mustache. This is not only offensive and childish, but for the White House to be using Mexican identity as a punchline while masked agents cruelly raid Mexican restaurants from Mississippi to Kansas to Ohio to New York is nothing short of the authoritarian playbook: scapegoat minorities, stoke violence against them, make light of that violence, and undermine public trust in institutions meant to serve the people.

This is the official White House website. This is the taxpayer-funded communication arm of the executive branch. This is not normal.

These visual choices matter because visual language is never neutral. It shapes our subconscious understanding of power, legitimacy, and identity. When the government itself deploys demeaning images—especially of Mexicans, Jews, women, and people of color, all in one website—it signals that mockery ought to be a part of governance.

Authoritarian regimes have long weaponized humor to discredit political opposition. Russia’s state media routinely deploys memes and parodies to humiliate dissidents. Hungary’s government‑aligned outlets use cartoonish depictions of opponents to belittle them. China deploys satire to shame and delegitimize pro‑democracy activists.

Fascists understand something fundamental about visual culture: when you reduce an opponent to a caricature, you reduce the public’s belief in their legitimacy—and in the legitimacy of having opponents at all.

By hosting this content on whitehouse.gov, the administration blurs the line between official information and political ridicule. The goal is not to entertain. It is to confuse. To degrade. To turn the government’s own communication apparatus into an arm of political bullying.

If the White House becomes a place where you expect memes instead of facts, partisan digs instead of transparency, and AI fakes instead of records, then one of the government’s most essential communication tools becomes meaningless.

Keep your eyes on the White House website. Keep taking photos and screenshots to document what’s going on so we can analyze and learn from it in the future. Keep asking questions. Stay skeptical.

Until next time, keep your eyes sharp and your lenses sharper.

Azza Cohen (she/her) is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who served as Vice President Kamala Harris’s official videographer in the White House. She recently founded a production company with her wife, Kathleen, and is writing a book about visual sexism from a cinematographer’s perspective. Uncover and address visual sexism alongside Azza every other week here on The Contrarian and on Instagram and Bluesky. The New Yorker distributed her film “FLOAT!” in 2023.

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