Trump and Musk Delight in the Sounds of Human Suffering With Sick “ASMR” Immigrant Video

On Tuesday afternoon, the official White House X account posted a video showing men in Seattle shackled by the wrists and ankles about to be boarded onto a plane for deportation.

The 40-second clip’s soundtrack is sparse, with no dialog or music — just the sounds of the plane engine and the jangle of handcuffs and chains first laid out by an officer from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, then attached to the immigrants, whose faces are not filmed.

The White House gave the video a macabre caption: “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.”

ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, is the pleasurable tingling some people experience in response to certain stimuli, often sound. There are millions of social media videos dedicated to the genre.

For the Trump administration, that pleasure is derived from the sounds of human bondage and racist exclusion.

To me, the sound was a clarion call: the thundering of a fascist machine that demands people of conscience stand up to gum up its works, that the clink of those chains should be silenced with blockages and blockades.

What we need now is not to follow Democratic Party officials — who have long since advocated harsher border rule and shown a willingness to serve Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. Instead, we have to to follow the lead of grassroots and front-line immigrant organizers who have been doing the work of opposing far-right nationalism long before this moment of renewed Trumpian reaction.

A Fascist Troll Is Still Fascism

When the White House’s video posted, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, offered his own comment: “Haha wow,” alongside two emojis: a troll and a medal.

The White House account was of course trolling — it reposted Musk’s comment too — and provoking outraged responses like this are part of their goal. There’s no contradiction, though, in an act being trollish and unambiguously serious in its fascist intent and effect.

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This is the puerile style of Trumpian fascism: a snickering lexicon of resentment shaped by online far-right culture wars, applied to the violent operations of racist law and border enforcement. The post doesn’t work as a “troll” if it doesn’t produce outrage, sure, but it also doesn’t work as a troll if it doesn’t produce pleasure for Trump’s base — pleasure at fascist domination.

There’s nothing particularly new about the concoction of fascist violence and irony either. The ghost-sheet costumes and ridiculous titles chosen by the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan were to hide members’ identities, but were also purposely absurd in an effort to distract from their violent intentions.

There was, of course, no costume that could disguise the Klan’s terrors, just as no meme-culture references can distract from Trump and Musk’s white supremacist extremism.

The White House’s post makes no attempt, even, to suggest that the anonymous men in chains have committed some sort of heinous acts. All we learn of them is that they fall into the vast category of state-determined “illegal aliens” and are therefore deserving of banishment and humiliation.

The shackles themselves — the video’s audio and visual focus — recall the most shameful episodes of this country’s unbroken history of racist oppression, from slave auctions to chain gangs.

The Ineffective Opposition

Centrist liberals may be horrified by the cruelty on display, but it was an Obama-era move to expand mass deportations under the rubric of removing only “criminals” — a category devoid of moral sense in a country that routinely criminalizes homelessness, poverty, and Blackness, but enables rape, extreme exploitation, and genocide.

The Biden administration and the Harris campaign bear great responsibility, too, for further normalizing the right-wing anti-immigrant agenda.

These Democratic leaders who are helping Trump carry out his nationalist program might want to reflect on the White House “ASMR” post — this is what they are aiding. They might consider, too, that this short clip captures just a slither of the far-reaching cruelty of the deportation machine — from the extremities of the extraordinary rendition of migrants on Guantánamo Bay, to the quotidian terror faced by millions of people who fear separation from their loved ones and lives.

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They are, however, unlikely to do so. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, for instance, told a press conference last month that she welcomed ICE going after “people who committed crimes, serious offenders, and those are exactly the people we want removed from the state of New York.” And dozens of Democrats helped pass the Laken Riley Act, which allows for the indefinite ICE detention of undocumented immigrants charged, but not even convicted, of crimes including petty theft.

“I want to be clear, there has always been ICE raids in the state of New York, even in the past, and this is not a new dynamic,” Hochul said. And while ICE was only founded in 2003, it’s true that a decadeslong bipartisan consensus has permitted attacks on immigrants to be the norm, paving the way for Trump’s nationalist excesses.

It is hoping too much to imagine a significant enough number of Democrats will reckon with their own complicity in creating the conditions for this moment. Displays of unambiguous fascist feeling from the White House, however, should at least give pause to those who have expressed willingness to further aid this authoritarian project.

What Needs to Be Done

Since I hold little hope for a robust antifascist response from Democratic leaders, the need for grassroots responses is clear. In cities and neighborhoods around the country, rapid-response networks to respond to ICE raids are proliferating, as are “know your rights” trainings. These are the crucial antidote, if not to the whole machinery, at least to minimizing its ill effects as much as possible.

The blockages and blockades of ICE’s heavy-handed actions need to grow. We need to support the churches and other local institutions that have committed to their role as sanctuary spaces; we need to refuse ICE’s unwarranted entry into our workplaces, schools, and residences; we need worker and union organizing that upholds the legacy of working-class, pro-immigrant resistance; and we need targeted direct action protest.

There are clear examples to follow: When Never Again Action and the Cosecha Movement briefly shut down ICE headquarters in Washington during Trump’s first term; when protesters swarmed New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport in 2017 against the Muslim ban, and cab drivers refused to drop passengers there; when the immigrant rebels of the gilets noirs occupied a terminal at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, in direct resistance to Air France’s role as “the official deporter of the French state.”

It all takes courage — in some cases, more courage and even risk than others. There are examples, if not in what to do, in the kind of fortitude it takes to get in the way of fascism. Take Willem Van Spronsen, a 69-year-old activist who in 2019 was shot dead by police when he attempted to incinerate a fleet of empty ICE vehicles outside a detention center in Tacoma, Washington. “I have an unshakable abhorrence for injustice,” he wrote in a short manifesto. “That is what brings me here.”

Van Spronsen’s solitary, self-sacrificial course of action is not what I’m advocating for here. We need collective direct action, pushing in many directions, against the gears of the necro-political deportation machine, to render individual extreme action unnecessary. It is Van Spronsen’s antifascist commitment that we should carry forward.

We must remember that it is Trump, Musk, and their Republican allies who delight in human suffering; Van Spronsen could not abide it. We need to all find our own ways, together, to demonstrate our unshakeable abhorrence for injustice.