This video of deportation is from the OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE account on X:
ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight đŸ”Š pic.twitter.com/O6L1iYt9b4
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 18, 2025
Andrew Egger, Sadism for Its Own Sake, The Bulerk, Feb. 19, 2025.
The White House is spotlighting the leering cruelty with which they carry out the deportations that are happening. Deporting former designees of temporary protected status back to countries where they face prosecution: check. Deporting migrants to countries they’ve never even visited: check. Holding detainees at Guantanamo Bay: check.
And yesterday, releasing the single most viscerally disturbing piece of deportation propaganda to date: A short video, posted to the official White House X account, titled “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.”
ASMR videos, which became popular on YouTube in the 2010s, use specific audio cues to stimulate feelings of relaxation and euphoria in the viewer. The White House video perversely mimics the style: lovingly lingering on the revving engine of an airplane waiting to take off; the jingling of chains as they are laid out in rows on the ground, then used to shackle deportees’ arms behind their backs; the shuffling of chained feet up into the plane. No faces are ever seen. The idea is not just that viewers should approve of the footage. It invites them to take sensual pleasure from it.
Plenty of Trump’s people were happy to oblige. The tweet quickly induced hooting replies—memes of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman blissfully vibing on his headphones in a MAGA hat, exhortations to “let the clanging bar sounds of Guantanamo Bay whisk you away to your happy place,” speculation about when “some of our corrupt politicians” would be going the same way.
Trump is degrading the moral fiber of his followers:
...the Trump years have genuinely made so many right-wing people worse. What they have undertaken has been a long, slow, corrosive education in vice: from giving themselves permission to rationalize away Trump’s cruelty, to indulging in it in a quasi-performative way themselves, to realizing—almost to their own surprise—how much they liked the taste.
There's more at the link.
