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White House Posts Underscore Meanness of Spirit
By Romen Basu Borsellino | 16 Jul, 2025
The White House's official Instagram account parodied the Tinder app to mock a Chinese woman who is now ICE custody.
The Trump White House didn't simply announce the detention of an undocumented immigrant on Tuesday. They mined the incident for comedic material and turned the woman’s struggle into an internet meme.
According to the post, Chinese citizen Jiejun Shen was apprehended for “Intent to Extort Marriage From a Person.” While we know few additional details about Shen’s situation, we do know that the White House is encouraging Americans to join them in laughing at her.
“ICE Swiped Right” read the post, which parodied the appearance of the dating app Tinder. A photo of Shen was depicted alongside that of an ICE agent next to the words “It’s a match,” meant to replicate the appearance of two Tinder users matching with one another.
The puns kept on rolling, as if the post's creators wrote for a B-level comedy and not the United States Government. “til deportation do us part” read the caption. The words “Recently Arrested” appeared in place of “Recently Active” and the Chinese flag was superimposed over the standard Twitter checkmark that denotes someone’s verification by the company.
For a group of people that derive pleasure from the pain and humiliation of others, it’s a surprise that the White House was so familiar with Tinder and not, say, Feeld, the app for fetishists.
The replies from Trump supporters hoping to get in on the joke were all too predictable: There were puns about happy endings and gross stereotypes about Asians’ appearances and pronunciations of certain words.
Sure, the internet is filled with sickos whose casual racism doesn't merit our attention. But in this case the perpetrators are being egged on directly by the White House, not unlike the way in which the same President encouraged his supporters to carry out the January 6th insurrection during his first term.
And the White House didn’t stop with the post. They also filled their replies with snarky retorts to their critics. Their actions can best be described as “trolling,” a word associated with bad faith internet behavior that might as well be an antonym of “Presidential.”
In some ways it’s no surprise. During his first term, President Trump’s vulgar social media presence was constantly the topic of debate. In one instance he Tweeted about a female journalist “Bleeding badly from a facelift.”
The major difference here, however, is that this is not Donald Trump’s personal account. It's the official account of the White House, a landmark commonly referred to as “The People’s House.”
Even supporters of the President have cited their distaste for his internet presence. “I’ll take Trump’s mean Tweets over Biden’s [XYZ policies]” was not an uncommon statement to hear on the campaign trail.
But to shrug off the social media posts is to ignore a symptom of a greater disease. They are part of a casual cruelty that looms over every aspect of his Presidency from policies that strip Medicare from the elderly to give tax breaks to the wealthy to a pattern of pardoning war criminals like Eddie Gallagher.
This post serves as a reminder that when it comes to civility, decorum, and basic human decency, there is simply no bottom for this Administration.
Yes, we may be able to live with a “mean tweet.” But can we thrive as a nation when we treat our neighbors as anything less than human? I have my doubts.
The puns kept on rolling, as if the post's creators wrote for a B-level comedy and not the United States Government.
The White House official Instagram account parodied the Tinder app to mock a Chinese woman now in ICE custody.
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