The details are still coming into focus, but there was a protest during Sunday services at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, earlier this week, and the disruption was reportedly driven by demonstrators’ belief that the church’s pastor works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Four days later, federal agents arrested three of those involved with the protest, including a civil rights attorney named Nekima Levy Armstrong.
That the White House celebrated Levy Armstrong’s arrest was not surprising. What mattered, however, is how the White House celebrated the development. The Associated Press reported:
On its official X page, the White House shared an image of Nekima Levy Armstrong that showed her in tears with her arms behind her back, standing in front of someone wearing a badge around their neck.
The problem? Levy Armstrong wasn’t actually crying. The image was manipulated to make the moment more dramatic than it actually was. … The original image, which shows Levy Armstrong with a neutral expression, was altered to make her appear emotional.
A related report in The New York Times noted that the newspaper ran the image through an artificial intelligence detection system that concluded the White House’s version of the photo “showed signs of manipulation.”
While Donald Trump and his White House team have promoted all kinds of AI-generated images and videos over the past year, it was obvious in earlier instances that the content wasn’t real. Rather, these were cartoonish and juvenile attempts at humor.
The image of Levy Armstrong was qualitatively different: It was designed to mislead. Don Moynihan, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, noted via Bluesky, “This is the first example I’ve seen of an American government using AI to meaningfully misrepresent actual events with the intent to deceive the public. We are at Stalinesque levels of propaganda.”
Pressed for an explanation, the White House pointed to a message from Kaelan Dorr, the president’s deputy communications director, who wrote online, “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.”
The White House doesn’t care that it was caught. On the contrary, Team Trump apparently thinks this is funny.
It is not.
Those who spend a fair amount of time online, especially on social media, have come to expect dubious content, often amplified by friends or relatives who may not know better. Ideally, Americans would be able to look to official sources of information as reliable and accurate.
But in 2026, the White House is no better than that annoying guy you went to high school with or that weird uncle who consumes conservative media all day. The president and his team, like your Facebook friends, have no qualms about spreading manipulated content without regard for accuracy.
The difference, of course, is that the White House knows it’s promoting deceptions, contributing to an information landscape in which Americans no longer know who or what to believe.
