How the Trump administration seeks to ‘weaponize’ the White House website to troll Democrats and amplify its message

By Kit Maher, CNN

(CNN) — In 2000, President Bill Clinton made an “Internet Address” celebrating new changes to the White House website that his administration launched just a few years earlier. Intended to be a source of government information for Americans and a connection to the White House from their homes, Clinton stressed that leaders have the responsibility to use tools like the website “to expand the reach of democracy.”

“We’ve made the website a permanent part of the Executive Office of the President, so that future presidents will be able to change it to suit their needs as easily as they can change the furniture here in the Oval Office,” Clinton said.

Twenty-five years later, President Donald Trump has done far more than just swap out the furniture, and the sound of construction is not unusual on White House grounds. The aggressive remodel has extended online, where the second Trump administration has transformed the government website into a tool to troll Democrats.

Now, a timer on the White House website tracks how long “Democrats Have Shut Down the Government” down to the second, even as Senate Democrats joined with Republicans on Monday to advance a funding measure. A “mysafespace” webpage, in the style of the early 2000s site MySpace, mocks Democrats and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, dubbing him “Sombrero Guy” and “Dollar Store Obama,” while claiming his heroes are “transnational gangs, illegal immigrants” and radical leftists.

And amid public outrage over Trump’s demolition of the East Wing for his new ballroom, the administration has added several controversial, and in some cases mischaracterized, intervals to a timeline of White House construction.

“We use it to really drive a message,” a White House official said. “The website is informative in a lot of different ways, but it’s also a vehicle to push our message, and we’re able to weaponize it in a way that no other administration has been able to do.”

But while the second Trump administration’s social media strategy has long embraced memes and videos mocking Democrats, former White House officials are raising concerns about the irreverent approach bleeding over to a website previously geared toward historical and informational ends.

And that uproar is part of the White House’s intention – to spread its message further.

“The outrage on the left is great because they’re just consumed with it,” the White House official said. “It’s great for our base, because they’re able to take a screenshot or a snippet of the timeline and post it on social media.”

Following Trump’s lead

The digital strategy under the Trump administration, the White House official said, is to not only follow the president’s lead but to amplify it.

“It’s spitballing with ideas on the fly. I mean, a lot of it is what we say, ‘Follow the leader,’ which is what President Trump has done on social media, and just amplify it. And, you know, try to take it to the next level,” they said, pointing to the sombrero memes.

What began with Trump resharing an AI-generated racist and vulgar video of Jeffries in a sombrero alongside Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer at the White House morphed into taunts on social media to increase the size of the sombrero until the shutdown ends. And the meme has now crossed over to the White House website, where on the “mysafespace” page, dozens of sombreros appear in the background, and mariachi music starts playing when users hit the play button.

It pairs with an “About me” section that claims Democrats “couldn’t care less if our men and women in uniform get paid or if our neighborhoods are safe – we just love playing politics with people’s livelihoods.” And if users click on an option for “Contacting Hakeem,” the White House website generates a draft email to Jeffries’ and Schumer’s offices with prewritten text asking to reopen the government.

When asked whether there are any lines the White House isn’t willing to cross, the official said, “There’s certainly lines.”

“You can’t do anything that’s overtly political, right? You can’t run afoul of the Hatch Act,” they said, referring to legislation that prohibits the federal government and its employees, except for the president and vice president, from “engaging in partisan political activity,” including on social media. The official added, “We’re doing everything within the framework of what’s allowable.”

The aggressive approach strikes David Almacy, former White House internet and e-communications director under President George W. Bush’s administration, as a significant shift from past presidencies.

Almacy said he viewed whitehouse.gov as a way to keep Americans apprised on what the president was doing on a daily basis, contribute to a larger historical record of the president’s entire term and provide “an accurate historical and factual record of the White House as an institution.”

“It was very sort of like nondescript, the headlines. There was no political tone to it,” he recalled, adding the Bush administration tried to “adhere to the spirit of the Hatch Act.” “It was never derogatory. It was never meant to divide. It was meant to inform.”

“I think now it appears that mostly it’s being used as a political tool,” Almacy said.

‘Everybody is more unfiltered’

It’s “an outdated view,” a Republican digital operative familiar with the Trump administration’s digital efforts said, to think of the White House website as somewhere that a grade-school student goes to cite a paper, given “there are far more comprehensive historical resources.”

“It’s not about party. Everybody is more online. Everybody is more unfiltered. Everybody is more human sounding and authentic, and websites don’t sound like press releases anymore,” they said.

But former officials who worked on the White House website in past administrations say that the official government website should be a trusted and reliable resource, not be a place for mischaracterizing the truth and taking cheap shots at the opposing party.

“Citizens need to be able to rely on whitehouse.gov, and that public trust in government breaks down when there’s information that is politically motivated, especially in contexts that are meant to be historically grounded versus an administration’s individual priorities and issues,” Ashleigh Axios, a former creative director within the Office of Digital Strategy in the Obama administration, said in an interview with CNN.

She pointed to edits to the White House’s “About” page amid outrage over the East Wing demolition as “a misuse of whitehouse.gov and a misuse of government properties.”

This includes a picture marking Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky in the “Major Events Timeline” – part of several additions, including “Cocaine Discovered,” falsely linking former President Joe Biden’s son Hunter to cocaine found at the White House in 2023; a “Muslim Brotherhood Visit” under the Obama administration, which misleadingly uses a pre-presidency photo of Obama in Somali dress during a visit to Kenya; and the establishment of a “Trans Day of Visibility” under Biden’s administration.

“We called it internally the ‘Easter eggs’ to see if anyone would find it,” the Trump White House official said.

The timeline additions, which the official said pointed out hypocrisy, are unrelated to other items detailing construction projects at the White House. Key context is left out; photos misrepresent the facts and the new highlighted events clearly target Democratic administrations. On the page, the “East Wing Expansion Stages” are explained, but its demolition isn’t.

It didn’t take long for TMZ to write up the changes to the timeline, which White House communications director Steven Cheung reposted on X, writing, “HAHAHAHAHA!”

The timeline stood out to Axios, the Obama administration official, who posted on LinkedIn, “Misinformation has no place on the White House website.”

“WhiteHouse.gov isn’t just another website,” she said. “It’s the digital front door of the presidency.”

But to White House deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr, the additions to the timeline are just “unfortunate truths.” And he hinted more to come.

“These are truths. There is no misinformation. If WhiteHouse.gov is the front door of a presidency then our site is a reflection of the most innovative and communicative President in history. The facts will continue. The memes will continue. Enjoy :),” Dorr posted on X in response to Axios.

Macon Phillips, the former director of digital strategy at the White House in the Obama era, argued that the Trump administration’s provocative approach should be ignored. He characterized the strategy as a distraction from real issues facing Americans, like rising health care premiums – the key sticking point for Democrats during the government shutdown.

“Red herring is when they used to take spoiled fish and drag it across the field to get the hounds off the scent of the fox,” Phillips said. “This strategy that they have is meant to get us talking about this, instead of the fact that health insurance premiums in Vermont, where I live, are about to be gutted and people are going to die.”

An evolving digital landscape

While no previous administration has used the White House website quite as aggressively as the Trump administration, some digital teams have gotten in hot water for certain content posted on the site.

Obama’s second-term digital team once faced backlash for adding content to former presidential biographies that tied to the administration’s initiatives at the time, while the Bush administration’s digital team couldn’t hyperlink to sites outside of .gov and .mil., even nonprofits, like the Red Cross.

“Links to private media outlets with advertising, one could argue, could financially benefit those outlets if they write positive coverage,” Almacy, the Bush administration official, recalled.

“Our rules were pretty strict,” he added, noting how social media changed the digital landscape. “Now, it seems like it’s off the rails.”

The Republican digital operative said in his view, the biography of Trump on the Biden White House website “reads a little political.”

The Biden-era White House website factually includes Trump’s impeachments; the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot; the death count during the coronavirus pandemic; and the late 2018 government shutdown. But it also lists his achievements on signing a major tax reform law and moving the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

Almacy also recalled tone shifts on the Obama website, like a 2010 blog post, where the administration wrote, “The President blasts Republicans in the Senate.”

But he questioned how Republicans would react if the Obama administration made similar politically motivated additions to the “Major Events Timeline.” After years of working on the website, he said he doesn’t visit it anymore.

“Let’s imagine that Barack Obama posted things on white house.gov that were just completely derogatory and accusatory and attacking of Republicans. How do you think the Republicans would take that?” Almacy said. “This is the precedent that’s being set.”

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