President Donald Trump’s administration is posting sadistic memes on its social media accounts to prompt the public to cruelly laugh at migrants caught up in his mass deportation obsession. For example, last week, the White House X account exploited a new ChatGPT feature that allows users to transform images “into the style of Studio Ghibli,” the beloved animation studio, and posted a cartoon version of a posted photo of a crying undocumented migrant in handcuffs. The responses to the post were a mix of delight from supporters and horror from critics, and the practice illustrates how Trump knows he must dehumanize migrants  to justify his aggressive and increasingly extralegal efforts to deport them.

Trump couches his messages in seemingly unserious or “comical” aesthetics online to downplay how sinister they are. As I’ve written in the past, Trump uses humor as a weapon, in part by dressing up his violations of norms and degradation of his opponents as a joke.

The White House chose an unsympathetic subject for its Studio Ghibli-style meme — a migrant who reportedly had been deported in the past after pleading guilty to attempted possession with intent to distribute fentanyl. But regardless of what that person did or where one stands on this particular deportation or deportations in general — brandishing people’s pain as a political message is not a  defense of policy. Trump’s propaganda reveals that he delights in the pain of others, and he encourages the public to laugh with him.

Trump’s social media team is making performative sadism a full-fledged comms strategy. In February the White House posted a video of migrants being deported with the text “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” The “joke” is that the viewer is supposed to find it soothing to hear the sounds of the jangling of handcuffs and chains on migrants and the starting rumble of the plane that will deport them. On Feb. 14, above an image that looked like a valentine with Trump’s and  White House border czar Tom Homan’s heads surrounded by hearts, Trump posted“Roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally, and we’ll deport you,”

Trump’s friends have struck similar notes. El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele created a disturbing three-minute propaganda videowhich he released after Trump initially deported alleged Venezuelan gang members to a brutal prison in his country. Operating in a similar emotional register as Trump’s memes, Bukele’s video depicts the brutalization of prisoners as part of an exciting action sequence and revels in an authoritarian aesthetic in its depiction of phalanxes of police officers. It’s easy to see why Trump and Bukele are natural partners on this issue. Each of them takes pleasure in seeing others publicly humiliated.

Trump’s propaganda, which glories in the derision of those he terms “monsters,” is meant to help culturally authorize the extreme and potentially illegal measures he’s taking to deport them. The Trump administration is using flimsy evidencecircumventing due process and exploiting obscure provisions of immigration law to expel as many people as the administration considers socially or politically undesirable as possible. There’s a parallel track between, in the cultural sphere, treating migrants as not fully human and deserving of our derisive laughter and, as official policy, treating them as a class of people who have no rights.

Zeeshan Aleem

Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for BLN Daily. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Blue Light News, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter here.

Elon Musk has turned his attention to the Social Security Administration, the latest agency that his team of novice programmers has invaded for the apparent purpose of hobbling it. Wired magazine reported last week that the Department of Government Efficiency plans to replace the mainframes that power the agency’s mission and rebuild their functionality on new servers in a new programming language — with just a few months’ work.

Assuming Wired’s reporting is accurate, we know that such an effort will surely fail. The track record of decades of modernizations of thousands of software systems, in both the private and public sectors, makes that clear. This isn’t even an interesting-yet-flawed idea. It’s a hackneyed, clichéd bad idea that could only sound compelling to novice software developers. It’s like cooking a Thanksgiving turkey in 20 minutes by putting it in a blast furnace, or choosing to get measles instead of getting vaccinated against it: it sounds most convincing to the layperson who asks the fewest questions.

Critics complain that the COBOL programming language, widely in use in the SSA, is old and outdated. This is wrong.

The SSA delivered $1.3 trillion in benefits to 70 million beneficiaries in 2023, a testament to the quality of its infrastructure. The software that drives the SSA is the most critical part of that infrastructure. Like nearly all state and federal agencies, if the SSA’s specialized software doesn’t work, the agency is dead in the water. And as with other agencies, the SSA’s largest contracts are for the technical infrastructure that undergirds SSA’s missionwith firms such as IBM, Dell and Leidos being paid hundreds of millions of dollars to build and maintain the hardware and software that allow the agency to function. That might sound like a lot of money, but the agency’s overhead is legendarily low: administrative expenses come to just 0.5% of the total cost of the programwell below the overhead of 401(k) programs and most state and local government pensions.

Critics complain that the COBOL programming language, widely in use in the SSA, is old and outdated. This is wrong. While COBOL’s origins date to 1959, it’s an actively maintained programming language, with an updated standard published by the International Standards Organization in 2023. The advanced age of actively maintained languages is evidence of their sustainability and quality. Many “modern” languages are quite old: C is 52 years old, Python is 34 years old, and even JavaScript will turn 30 this year. COBOL remains so widely used in our financial system that 95% of ATM transactions rely on it. There are 220 billion lines of COBOL in use today. Why? Mostly because it’s really good at processing large amounts of business data.

Critics also complain that mainframes are antiquated in an era of cloud computing. In fact, mainframes are still in wide use throughout the public and private sectors. They are not the room-sized reel-to-reel machines of the 1960s, but instead sleek, modern machines that would turn any developer’s head. They excel anywhere that it’s important to have lots of processing power, high redundancy and the ability to muscle through big batches of data processing—precisely what the SSA needs.

Modernizing the SSA’s technical infrastructure is not a novel idea. The agency has continuously modernized its systems since 1982, and published a new digital modernization strategy just last year. That’s because one-time modernizations, at best, succeed only for a brief time. Without ongoing modernization, the infrastructure quickly will become old again. Continuous modernization does not necessarily mean replacing COBOL or moving the whole system off mainframes. It means identifying and prioritizing the most urgent needs of the system’s users and building whatever technical infrastructure is necessary to make that happen. It is entirely possible that COBOL on mainframes is the correct infrastructure for many of the needs of the Social Security Administration.

The important thing about the existing SSA technical infrastructure is that it works! Those 70 million people get their $1.3 trillion in monthly payments, which allow them to pay their rent, buy food, afford medications and give birthday presents to their grandkids. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s mother may not worry about getting her check — likely because her son is a billionaire — but to many of those 70 million people, their monthly check is all that’s keeping them housed, clothed and fed.

What could be the legitimate purpose of this incredibly dangerous operation?

If Twitter accidentally goes down for a few hours, nothing terrible happens. But if just one person misses a Social Security payment, that could drop the person off a financial cliff. Replacing the SSA’s core infrastructure with an entirely new system all at once is performing a high-wire act without a net, only it’s not DOGE staffers who risk falling — it’s the Social Security beneficiaries who depend on that social safety net.

Complex systems theoretically reflect a complex set of documented rules — in this case, laws, regulations and policies — but, in practice, there are additional rules that are encoded only in the software, documented nowhere else. To the inexperienced software developer, it can seem self-evident that you can replace an old system with a new one by using the documented, but the experienced software developer knows that’s a trap.

Replacing COBOL is a special challenge, for a reason generally known only to experienced COBOL developers: math works differently in COBOL. It handles decimals unlike any other programming language, which is particularly important for large financial systems working at the scale of the SSA. What COBOL might calculate as 1,000.99, Java might calculate as 1,000.98. Neither number is wrong in a mathematical sense, but for an accounting and payment system designed around decades of COBOL-based math, the Java-based answer is functionally wrong. For a system making 840 million financial transactions annually, such a small difference in math can quickly spiral into a disaster.

Even if we imagine that there was a complete, successful replacement of the COBOL mainframes with a different programming language and different servers, it’s not at all clear that anybody would benefit. The existing systems get the job done. And the mainframes are just for the backend of the system that handles data storage, tracking and accounting. The front end — the parts of the system that the public sees — would be left untouched by such a modernization. If the existing backend functions fine, and the front end doesn’t require modernization, what could be the legitimate purpose of this incredibly dangerous operation?

There are two possible explanations: either the DOGE programmers are so inexperienced and cocksure that they think this can actually work, or this is a cover for doing serious damage to the Social Security system. As a nation, we cannot afford the risk that either of these explanations are right, or the even greater and more likely risk: that both explanations are right.

That the SSA’s systems are old is not evidence of them being problematic — on the contrary, it is evidence of their reliability and sustainability. There is no “one neat trick” that will make a complete overhaul possible in the span of a few months. Hard things are hard. DOGE’s effort is likely to fail and threatens to bring down Social Security along with it.

Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith was an Obama administration appointee in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, a Biden administration appointee at the General Services Administration, and a special government employee at the Treasury Department.

The Justice Department will seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City, Attorney General Pam Bondi said Tuesday.

Calling the fatal shooting of Thompson on Dec. 4 “an act of political violence,” Bondi said in a statement that she has directed acting U.S. Attorney Matthew Podolsky to pursue the death penalty for Mangione, 26, “as we carry out President Trump’s agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again.”

Mangione has yet to be indicted on federal charges, as federal prosecutors are allowing state prosecutors in New York to pursue their case first. If convicted on the New York charges, he could receive life in prison without parole.

He also faces state charges in Pennsylvania, where he was arrested days after the killing. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him.

Mangione’s lawyer did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment about Bondi’s directive.

The Trump administration has been a huge proponent of the death penalty. On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order for the U.S. attorney general to pursue the death penalty “where possible,” and to encourage state prosecutors to do the same.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Clarissa-je Lim

Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking/trending news blogger for BLN Digital. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.