Mother Jones
The Power of Mocking Trump’s Pathetic Monsters
Over a few weeks this January, two Minneapolis sisters repeatedly left their homes and headed out to mock, insult, and record Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino, who until recently was leading the disastrous and violent anti-immigrant operation of the city. The first time they heard him speak, the women, who uploaded their street surveillance of Bovino to TikTok, howled with laughter: Bovino’s voice is somewhat high and surprisingly nasal. “Wait, your voice is not what I expected,” one of the women hollered through a megaphone, sounding near tears with hilarity. “Speak again! Talk again!”
“When I realized that I had eyeballs on these videos, I had some power.”
The first time they had seen Bovino, things went differently. The two women, who are both in their 20s and asked that they not be named or have their videos linked, were standing on a public sidewalk after spotting ICE vehicles nearby, when Bovino walked out of a local TV-affiliate’s building flanked by masked men.
“I had my megaphone,” one sister told me. “And I just screamed at him with all the rage in my body from across the street.” While righteously venting was, she says, “cathartic,” she noticed that Bovino also seemed to enjoy it. “He was energized by it. It was so gross.”
With their anger seeming to backfire, the sisters “realized we need to strategize,” she says. After some research, “we chose mockery as a deliberate tactic,” she says, a way to try to respond to and puncture the image that Bovino has carefully crafted. “His social media presence, his news appearances—everything he does—leans into these theatrics,” she says. “He posts what I call thirst traps to his Instagram, these edited videos of him walking around and detaining people. It was so clear that it was the attention that he wanted.”
Luck was on their side; the next time they saw Bovino again, he looked at the sisters and chirped, “All right! Title 8 immigration enforcement!”
Her laughing response of borderline hysteria worked, she says: “You can see in his body language that it just shuts him down.” The video went viral, and prompted the sisters to create a series of riotously funny and often uncomfortable videos based on their continued birddogging of Bovino and the agents accompanying him.
“I wanted to put a video out there so other people could see him and make sure they could recognize him in public and make sure he didn’t have peace,” the Minnesota woman explains. “I wanted to alter public perception of him. He works so visibly hard to portray a powerful image. When I realized that I had eyeballs on these videos, I had some power myself to alter that perception.”
Before his apparent demotion and unceremonious return to the arid confines of El Centro, California, Bovino had come to stand in for the proudly amoral, violent, lie-riddled way that ICE has conducted operations in Minnesota and elsewhere. He’s also an excellent representation of how monumentally cheesy these guys are. The Border Patrol commander, who is, as many protesters have pointed out, quite diminutive in stature, likes to stride around in a long military-style green coat and a questionably useful leather cross-body strap, both of which clearly resemble outfits donned by Nazi SS commanders. “Get your Hitler coat off, you little bitch,” one of the Minneapolis women recommended during one of their on-camera interactions. (In a sympathetic interview with the outlet News Nation, Bovino claimed that the coat is “Border Patrol issued,” adding, “I’ve had it for over 25 years.”)
More broadly, the clothes that ICE and CBP agents wear are a fine example of the powerful blend of menace, deadly incompetence, and total lack of drip they constantly display. Having made anonymity a hallmark, they virtually always appear masked, sometimes sporting neck gaiters with skulls on them, when they’re not wearing what GQ has called “Dropshipped Normcore,” “a kind of algorithmically-influenced, masculine mish-mash of the kind of high-crowned baseball hats, tight graphic T-shirts, open plaid button-ups, slim stretch denim jeans or cargo pants, and anonymous walking sneakers or trail shoes.” The author and illustrator Molly Crabapple has called them a “Temu death squad.” It’s no surprise that masked ICE agents slipping on (real) ice have provoked such intense hilarity that Homeland Security officials apparently instructed FEMA workers to avoid using the term “ice” in recent winter storm warnings, to avoid having their posts “being turned into internet fodder.”
It is, of course, not just ICE and CBP who look and sound like tremendous dorks while doing real and frightening damage. The Trump administration has adopted a cruel, gross, and weird way of communicating, blending moldy internet memes with overt white supremacy. The way they perform impunity when they are caught doing that is also a blend of chilling and deeply uncool. After Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Twin Cities activist was arrested after allegedly disrupting a church service, the White House was caught circulating a manipulated image showing her in tears. (Actual photos of the arrest show her looking calm and serious as she’s led away.) After The Guardian broke that story, the White House responded with what they clearly considered to be an epic clapback. As deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr posted, “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
The response from the American public has been to continue making fun of this administration.
“The memes will continue” is incredibly weak: it sounds like something Elon Musk would tweet in his frenzied and thus far unsuccessful efforts to be funny online. The White House’s memes about taking over Greenland last month also had an unpleasantly Musk-like aroma: an AI-generated image of Donald Trump walking hand-in-hand with a penguin that is holding an American flag, for instance, along with the words “Embrace the penguin.” (There are no penguins in Greenland, or really anywhere in the northern hemisphere.)
These attempts at meme-based relevance go hand-in-hand with all the unsuccessful pivots and impersonations that people in the Trump orbit have tried to look cool, culturally relevant or even, God help us, badass: Katie Miller’s excruciatingly dull fascist wine mom podcast, say, or Pete Hegseth’s American flag-lined suit, camo ties, and ongoing impression of Slim Pickens‘ atomic bomb-riding cowboy character in Dr. Strangelove. There’s also JD Vance pretending he enjoys the Internet jokes about him having sex with a couch. All of these gambits try—and fail—to serve the same purpose: to make these people look cool, funny, or with it while they advance a profoundly unpopular agenda.
Not surprisingly, the response from a large sector of the American public has been to continue making fun of this administration, from our increasingly exasperated and radicalized late night hosts—minus the always gutless Jimmy Fallon—to Minnesota protesters braving subzero temperatures to throw snowballs at ICE vehicles, pour a little freezing water on the ground, and let Greg Bovino know his coat looks stupid. Even world leaders openly mock Trump, as in a viral video from earlier this year of the leaders of France, Azerbaijan, and Armenia joking about Trump’s inability to keep the later two countries straight, or who might be at war with whom.
Trump’s opponents have tried this before: the former-reality TV star was treated like a joke almost right until the moment he won the 2016 election. It was hard not to, what with his surreal Baked Alaska hair, his ridiculous braggadocio, his weird grudge against windmills, and other endless things about him to mock—physically, financially, and spiritually. Recall, if you will, that the Huffington Post classified Donald Trump under “entertainment” news until, at the end of 2015, they had to stop doing that. Personally, in the time I worked at the feminist website Jezebel, we came up with dozens of creative nicknames to describe the then-candidate, including ones like “future leader of the free world” that I imagine were somewhat funny at the time.
Srdja Popovic, a self-described “revolution consultant” whose activism helped overthrow Slobodan Milosevic, calls mocking the powerful “laughtivism”—using humor and creativity to effect profound social change. The Minnesota woman says that in their video-recorded beclowning of Greg Bovino, she and her sister happened on a central principle of mocking a powerful public figure, one that Popovic also understood: forcing the target into a situation where he would wind up looking silly no matter what. Popovic calls it a “dilemma action.”
“We put him in a lose-lose situation,” the Minnesota woman says. “He could’ve kept talking and we would make fun of his voice, or he shuts up and we looked like we shut him down.”
Dictators and despots understand the dangers of humor: early in his rule, Vladimir Putin was reportedly enraged by a depiction of him as an ugly, weird-looking puppet on “Kukly,” a show put out by the then-independent TV channel NTV. He demanded his puppet avatar never appear again and the show, as the New Yorker has written, cheekily obliged: a subsequent episode showed Putin as various weird manifestations of God, like “as a burning bush and a storm cloud.”
In Nazi Germany, people also mocked Reich officials for being unpopular, incompetent, sweaty losers; so-called “whisper jokes” proliferated as a way to express discontent. Germans did this even when the stakes were deadly: in 1943, a woman named Marianne K cracked a joke about Hitler standing atop a radio tower with with Goering, trying to come up with something that would cheer up Berliners. “Why don’t you jump?” Goering suggests. After someone ratted her out, Marianne was soon executed.
By clumsily attempting to get in on the jokes, the people in charge try to defuse their power.
In an echo that might sound familiar today, Hitler and other Reich officials also took their own stabs at humor to make themselves more popular: a New York Times article from 1940, with the unfortunate headline “Hitler’s Fun,” says that a recent speech by the dictator was full of “merry quips,” adding, “He was very jovial about the thousands and thousands of bombs he promised to drop on England nightly for every hundred the British raiders scatter over Germany.”
By 1944, mockery was firmly entrenched in Germany as a form of dissent, the Times reported, including widespread parodies of popular Nazi songs. “None of the joking is very brilliant humor,” the paper sniffed, “some descending to gutter level, but showing, nevertheless, the general discontent with the Nazi regime on the part of vast numbers who have been deprived of other means of registering their disapproval.”
The danger with merely making jokes, then as now, is that they serve as a way to let off steam without effecting actual change. The Nazis, for instance, tried to at first stem the tide of parody songs, as the Times reported, before eventually thinking the better of it: “Goebbels evidently has decided on second thought that this sort of activity was a safety valve that would be dangerous to remove.” Similarly, JD Vance has not only pretended to love being called a couch-fucker, but, on Halloween, dressed as one of the memes of himself that has circulated online. By clumsily attempting to get in on the joke, the people in charge try to defuse the power those jokes have against them.
These days, it feels borderline delusional to think it will do any good to mock Trump or the various maladaptive, malevolent dorks around him. Every joke that could be made has been, and all of them have bounced off him like a million arrows against the carapace of an armadillo streaked with cheap self-tanner. (See, I couldn’t resist one more, and look where it’s gotten us: nowhere.) Most credit for how Minnesota is prevailing against ICE should go to serious, effective, broad-scale activism, resistance, and community solidarity—and not just jokes about Greg Bovino.
Yet the two things aren’t mutually exclusive. And in a way, jokes about Trump, ICE, and all the rest of them are a way of reasserting and insisting upon observable reality: what’s taking place is shocking, reprehensible—and also powerfully wack. When then-vice presidential candidate and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz called Trump and his gang “weird,” it went over remarkably well, a rare example of a politician simply saying what so much of the public was thinking.
Humor alone will not save us. But perhaps it allows us to continue the painful task of looking at what’s really happening here, and, in the words of the artist Barbara Kruger, “the ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers” who are doing it to us.
The day that we spoke, the Minneapolis woman was digesting Bovino’s departure, and Tom Homan’s installation. “I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing and learn about the new guy,” she told me. If ICE ever actually leaves her city, she adds, “I think sharing what we as a community have learned with the other cities that they’re going to go to will be huge. I think we’re going to be a model for the resistance of the occupation. I hope my videos showed one way of doing that, but there are so many more.”