Minnesota shows what happens when governing and content creation merge

A helicopter flies low across the water at night before heavily armed figures rappel to the ground, take their positions and break down a door. It's not a trailer for a movie, a video game or a recap of a Pentagon operation.

Instead, it's a video from the Department of Homeland Security showcasing Border Patrol agents at work. Despite the combative visuals, it is captioned with the Bible verse, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God."

In President Trump's second term, content is governing and governing is content. Videos like these — as well as from friendly influencers — are how the administration justifies its increasingly aggressive immigration policies.

The messaging blitz to control the narrative has most recently been on display in Minnesota, where a surge of agents and the fatal shooting last week of 37-year-old Renee Macklin Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent has put the White House's online statements and real-life actions in the spotlight.

After another ICE-involved shooting in Minneapolis Wednesday evening, videos showed federal agents using flash-bang grenades, pepper balls and chemical irritants against protestors. Almost immediately, pro-Trump influencers used clips of the incident to call for the president to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy the military.

By Thursday morning, Trump had threatened to do just that unless the "corrupt politicians of Minnesota" stopped "the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job." The White House posted an image of armed federal agents, some wearing masks, with the caption, "STAND WITH ICE."

It's not just Minnesota where the Trump administration is using social media to drive its policies and speak to targeted audiences.

In the first weeks of 2026, a military raid to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro generated a flood of viral images and clips. Official photos of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others showed that they were also monitoring search results for Venezuela on the social media platform X.

The Labor Department shared a graphic tagged with a popular QAnon conspiracy slogan urging Americans to "Trust the Plan" while an ICE recruitment post on Instagram proclaims "WE'LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN," attaching a song of the same name popularized by white supremacists.

White House / Getty Images

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Getty Images

Online and from the White House briefing room, Vice President JD Vance chastised the media and critics, while the official White House X account copied popular meme formats to regularly assert that the United States will take over Greenland.

"The strategy looks more like continuous campaigning, more so than the controlled and toned down communication we typically would associate with a governing administration," said Yini Zhang, a University at Buffalo professor who studies political communications on social media. "Volume is a feature, because they can post very frequently and they can shape agenda and framing in real time."

The administration's posts are often designed to provoke a reaction, troll opponents and frequently paint Democrats, immigrants and the media as threats.

"It's combative, it's highly provocative, but it's also focused on a very particular kind of fight between real Americans — which maps on to MAGA — and then this imagined liberal other," said Whitney Phillips, a professor at the University of Oregon who studies how information impacts people. She added, "It is framed as a full-on cosmic drama between ultimate good and ultimate evil."

In a statement to NPR, White House assistant press secretary Liz Huston said "the White House has an authentic style and unmatched communications strategy because it's led by the greatest communicator in the history of American politics – President Donald J. Trump."

From viral video to funding cuts in three weeks

The Trump administration's aggressive immigration crackdown in Minnesota, which has been labeled the largest DHS operation in history, was itself propelled by viral social media content created by its allies, specifically a video created by 23-year-old YouTuber Nick Shirley that alleged widespread fraud at several Somali-run daycare centers.

Shirley visited a number of daycares unannounced with a camera and an entourage and claimed the daycare centers must not actually be serving children because he found locked doors or staff declined to answer questions and he could not see if there were kids inside. His specific claims are so far unsubstantiated — state investigators found daycares featured in the film operating as expected.

Other massive fraud schemes in state social service programs are well documented. In a federal case that began during the Biden administration, at least 78 people, many of them of Somali descent, have been criminally charged related to a $250 million scheme involving a COVID-era nutrition program.

Vance quickly praised Shirley's video and this week, as Shirley released a second one, the White House posted, "The videos from Nick Shirley have shed tremendous light on the situation in Minnesota."

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has announced unprecedented efforts to withhold federal funding for Minnesota and other Democratic-led states, though courts have so far blocked most of those attempts. Trump also threatened Tuesday to halt payments to "sanctuary cities or states having sanctuary cities" next month.

The administration also announced the end of Temporary Protected Status for Somali nationals on Tuesday and included a meme referencing a Somali pirate from a Tom Hanks movie. Trump then posted on his own social media website, defending ICE and warning there was more to come: "FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!"

The Homeland Security X account this week shared a "reminder" from White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller that ICE officers "have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties," indicating the administration has no intention of trying to lower the temperature.

But legal scholars have pointed out that federal agents do not have absolute immunity and can be prosecuted for crimes, with some exceptions.

"Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony," Miller said on Fox News. "You have immunity to perform your duties and no one — no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist — can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties."

A rush to judgment

Video footage from Jan. 7 shows Renee Macklin Good, a U.S. citizen, was blocking a lane in her SUV on a Minneapolis street when ICE agent Jonathan Ross circled her car and two other agents then ordered her out of her vehicle. One agent tried to open the driver's side door. Good briefly reversed her car, turned her steering wheel to the right which turned her wheels away from Ross, who at that point was near the front left of the car, and drove forward.

Ross fired his gun, fatally shooting Good. DHS officials have told media outlets, including NPR, that Ross suffered internal bleeding from being struck by the car. The agency has not responded to NPR's questions about the extent of the injuries.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz blamed the Trump administration for escalating tensions. "What we're seeing is the consequences of governance designed to generate fear, headlines, and conflict," Walz said at a press conference after the shooting. "It's governing by reality TV, and today that recklessness cost someone their life."

Multiple videos of the shooting from different angles — including the video Ross had recorded on his own cell phone in one hand as he fired his gun with his other — were shared online and incorporated into a sea of content from administration officials aimed at justifying the shooting.

Instead of awaiting an investigation to determine the facts about Good's death, the Trump administration's immediate response left no room for nuance or debate. Within hours, Trump posted to his social media platform that Good "violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer," adding that "it is hard to believe he is alive."

Vance called Good a "deranged leftist," said "nobody debates" that she aimed her car at the officer and put her foot on the accelerator, and scolded journalists on X for "lying" about the "innocent" ICE officer.

Four days later, when it was clear that many Americans and media outlets had interpreted the video evidence differently, a DHS agency spokesperson made a video reinforcing the administration's narrative and trying to discredit other interpretations. "The nonstop lies and smears from the FAKE NEWS are meant to tear down our brave men and women who protect our homeland every day," read the caption.

The swiftness of the Trump administration's very online effort to control the narrative of the shooting has frustrated critics, including Michael Brodkorb, a former officer of the Minnesota Republican Party who says the emphasis on "leadership through social media" is not helping soothe tensions.

Octavio Jones / AFP via Getty Images

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AFP via Getty Images

"There was no reason whatsoever I think from a public policy standpoint, from a law enforcement standpoint or from an investigative matter, to go out and frame what occurred in such blunt, raw language — other than for content to energize folks on social media and to whip them up into a lather," Brodkorb said.

Brodkorb said the videos that document before, during and after the shooting gives people more information and perspective about what happened, but at the same time a broader online conflict around Minnesota — like Trump calling people from Somalia "garbage" — means there is no humanity in the discussion.

"We've lost the ability to creatively and constructively think about problems," he said. "Critical thinking is just gone. It's out the window, and it's becoming more and more difficult for people to, in essence, call balls and strikes fairly often and things that we're seeing right in front of our eyes without being lobbed into one camp or another."

The current political environment has switched from being policy driven to narrative driven, where someone's perspective on an issue is determined by the party they voted for instead of what they could be persuaded to believe, said Larry Schack, a political strategist who recently published an analysis of the 2024 election with the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.

"We found that voters have largely abandoned issue-by-issue assessment," he wrote this week. "Instead, they adopt broad partisan narratives that shape their understanding of everything, including — as we're seeing in real time — the basic facts of a shooting captured on video."

Schack told NPR that an increase of political messaging that reinforces division is "the type of environment in which democracy over time becomes unsustainable."

In the case of the Minnesota shooting, Schack said the immediate jump to partisan conclusions meant that evidence "doesn't exist to inform, the evidence exists to create and expand and blow out the narratives that support the predominant view of each side."

Trump's rise to power has been accelerated by the internet

The Trump administration's governance through content creation strategy is in some ways the logical conclusion for a president whose 2016 campaign was shaped by headline-grabbing social media posts, is now the owner of a social media site, and whose return to the White House was propelled in part by the growing influence of right-wing content creators and podcasters as well as the algorithms of sites like X.

While the early days of 2026 have been dominated by an especially intense digital presence from the Trump administration, its perpetually online strategy has been central to key initiatives from the start of his second term.

The Department of Government Efficiency effort that spent much of 2025 attempting to overhaul the government was inspired by a longstanding online meme and overseen by Elon Musk, the owner of the social media platform X.

DOGE's efforts to cancel federal contracts, fire federal workers and obtain unprecedented access to sensitive data on millions of Americans were themselves fueled by online suggestions on X and defended in social media content that relied on overstated and inaccurate claims of fraud.

The always-online focus is also evident in the Trump administration's staffing. Multiple administration officials had large followings as online influencers before joining government, including Dan Bongino who recently left the FBI and has promised to start podcasting again. Last month, Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, grumbled on X that her follower count was not growing. "What kind of content do my folks want to see more of to like and share?" she posted.

The consequences of having senior government officials compulsively posting online is a concern for Don Moynihan, a professor at University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy, who called the fusion of posting and policy a "clicktatorship."

"Spending excessive time online leads to more extreme behavior in an unrealistic and increasingly toxic environment — just to keep the dopamine coming," Moynihan wrote in his newsletter. "These bubbles are far worse for the rich and powerful, who already have limited contact with people not beholden to them. It hardly needs pointing out that this is less than ideal for a representative government."

In the last year, the Trump administration has come to view influencers and partisan journalists as a primary audience it needs to cater to. It holds special briefings for them, gives them access to Cabinet members and invites them on ICE ride-alongs.

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One event last year, to discuss antifa, the far-left ideology opposing fascism, came about after pro-Trump influencers amplified protests in Portland over ICE and portrayed the city as a war zone requiring military intervention. The invitees included Nick Shirley. Some influencers urged Trump to designate antifa as a foreign terrorist organization. The following month the State Department issued the designation for four European leftist groups. 

"You have to think about the political influencers as being quite aligned and part of that propaganda machine, in part because of the incentives and the access that they have to the administration," said Renée DiResta, a professor at Georgetown University who studies online adversarial abuse, influence and propaganda.

"And that, I think that's not typically how people have thought about propaganda. They thought about it more as a top down media, if anything, or state media. But this intersection with the creator and the administration is changing what that word means and how that relationship operates."

Many of those same online influencers are now sharing video of clashes between protesters and federal agents in Minneapolis.

"What drives attention more than ever is conflict, animosity," Brodkorb, the Minnesota Republican, said. "And that's just not a way to solve problems, and it can just inflame a situation. And what we're seeing right now in Minnesota is exactly that."

Winning the internet – but not public opinion?

The Trump administration's social media-first strategy has played a role in numerous other controversies in the last year, often involving AI-generated images and videos to troll political opponents, including a video that purported to show Trump piloting a fighter jet and dropping poop on a Democratic commentator and anti-Trump protesters.

The Department of Homeland Security in particular has come under fire for repeated posts that reference extremist and neo-Nazi material, and in recent days the Department of Labor and the White House have also posted content that include such dog whistles.

But catering to its most fervent online supporters has also sometimes backfired on the administration. During the 2024 campaign, Trump and his allies embraced conspiracies about Jeffrey Epstein and vowed to release all of the government's information about Epstein, who died by suicide while in jail awaiting trial on charges of sexually abusing and trafficking children. Trump's campaign suggested Democrats were behind efforts to keep the truth from the public.

Once in office, Attorney General Pam Bondi invited a group of pro-Trump influencers to receive binders that supposedly included part one of the Epstein files, only for it to be revealed that they included little new material. Trump then spent much of the year attacking his supporters' calls for the documents to be released.

Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images

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AFP via Getty Images

The disappointment and outrage among some Trump supporters about his handling of the Epstein documents ultimately led to a small rebellion among congressional Republicans, who approved near-unanimous legislation requiring the federal government to release almost all the information it has about Epstein after Trump relented to the pressure.

The White House posting style has also inspired some opponents, most notably California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and more recently New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, to mimic Trump's trolling antagonism.

But this coarsening of the political discourse can have grave consequences and lead to more polarization, Zhang of the University at Buffalo warns.

"More people might be repelled by politics and might tune out of politics and political news because they are just disgusted with the harsh rhetoric and this kind of like endless finger pointing and blaming from both sides," Zhang said.

At the same time, recent viral videos of masked federal agents in Minneapolis using aggressive tactics, including smashing car windows and dragging people out of them, could prompt some Americans who had stopped following the news this year to tune back in.

On Wednesday evening, Walz urged Minnesotans to use their cell phones to make more videos of ICE agents' abuses.

"Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans — not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution," Walz said.

Videos that show things that Americans are not used to seeing are hard to ignore, said Phillips of the University of Oregon.

"The irony might ultimately be that if the administration has harnessed for their own benefit the algorithms and trending topics — that those very same things might be what ultimately become part of their undoing when people see it and then think, 'Oh, God,'" Phillips said.

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