Illegal immigrants stare blankly past the cameras as authorities frisk them for weapons. Video footage shows them shuffling in handcuffs and ankle irons, gang tattoos adorning their weathered faces. It’s a stark scene. And then, the music hits you.
“You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”
As Supersonic’s “Closing Time” crescendos into the famous refrain, the camera pans out to show the shackled illegals boarding a Border Patrol plane. They are being deported out of the United States, in fulfillment of President Donald Trump’s campaign promises.
The video, which the White House shared in March, racked up millions of views. So did an “illegal immigrant deportation flight ASMR,” posted as a tongue-in-cheek relaxation video that featured chained illegal immigrants walking up onto a plane. That one has a jaw-dropping 104.5 million views on X alone.
Trump’s base loves it. “We are so f*ckin back,” one user commented on the video. “I LOVE AMERICA,” gushed another. And then the most consistent comment: “This is what I voted for!”
Much like during Trump’s first term in office, the Left is outraged by this sort of messaging from the White House. This time around, Trump’s team doesn’t care. When The Daily Wire asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt about the strategy behind the deportation video at a March press briefing, she didn’t miss a beat.
“We are unafraid to message effectively what the president is doing on a daily basis to make our communities safer,” she said, and she leaned forward to deliver a quip that would also go viral: “The specific video you referenced, I think it sums up our immigration policy pretty well: you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”
This is the style of Trump 2.0, several administration officials shared in interviews with The Daily Wire: campaign-style aggression and unapologetic ownership of the policies that Trump promised the American people he would enact, streamlined through the type of edgy meme material that young people are so drawn to.
Donald Trump hasn’t changed, the officials say. He’s still the same leader, and just as determined to “Make America Great Again.” What has changed is the media landscape — and the people surrounding the president.
‘You Have To Adapt With The Times’
The communications office in the first Trump administration was one of the “most dysfunctional departments in the White House,” Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung told The Daily Wire. He would know, since he saw it first hand. That department was a chaotic revolving door of press secretaries and communications directors, rife with rivalries, egos, and leaks.
And while many of those in the first Trump administration were personally loyal to the president, there was some hesitancy throughout that White House when it came to truly owning Trump’s policy.
That’s hardly a problem this time around. Cheung says Trump 2.0 is not constrained by the “typical guardrails of what’s considered government norms or White House norms.”
Why? Because that’s not where Cheung believes the public is. From his vantage point, the American people want unfiltered, unvarnished messaging, particularly after four years under the Biden administration.
“The public wants a government who will speak clearly, apologetically without any pretenses, and they want unfiltered messaging. That’s how we’ve done it on the campaign. That’s how we’ve done it here,” Cheung explained. “We’ve essentially migrated the communications operation from the campaign to here. You have to adapt with the times.”
To those on the outside, the change in style has put the White House in control of the narrative, not the legacy media.
“There is much more of a sense from the outside that the administration is in command of the narrative,” said Matthew Continetti, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and author of The Right, a history of conservative politics. “It’s not reacting all the time, whether that reaction was to outside events or criticisms, or even internal debates and disputes within the first administration.”
Continetti credits the change to the administration’s “unapologetic” posture. And he’s not alone in that judgement.
You wouldn’t have seen the “Closing Time” deportation video during Trump 1.0, Leavitt conceded in an interview from her West Wing office as she gave her young son a bottle. But Trump was still deporting illegals, building a border wall, and posting about his plans in all caps online.
What’s different, Leavitt suggests, is not only this administration’s style, but the different landscape in which it operates.
“I don’t view it as the first term team wasn’t doing what they should have been doing,” Leavitt reflected, specifically praising her predecessor Kayleigh McEnany for being “uninterested in appeasing the left-wing” media. “I think they fought the good fight as best they could, but I think the media environment and the landscape has just changed since then.”
The media looked unquestionably different in 2017, and the White House has embraced the new landscape, encouraging outlets like The Daily Wire to enter the press pool and maintain close coverage of “the most transparent president in history.”
(Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
This attitude began on the campaign trail, when Trump sat for interviews with top podcasters. The president’s three-hour interview with Joe Rogan has more than 45 million views on YouTube and over 35 million listens across Spotify and other platforms. On election night, many Americans followed Trump’s victory on livestreams that blew network TV out of the water.
The Trump team believes that engaging with new media — through Trump, who is unafraid to actually engage in real conversations — is a big reason why they are back in the White House. The press team will always engage with legacy media (Trump just this weekend appeared for a long form interview on 60 Minutes) but mainstream outlets no longer have a chokehold on the White House press office. To Leavitt, that’s a response to changing habits of Americans.
“Conservative, non-traditional media became more prominent and popular than ever during Joe Biden’s administration because the American public was sick and tired of hearing the propaganda from the leftist traditional media,” Leavitt says.
There was a time in American politics when the White House, in order to get its message out, had to contend with the editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post and the producers who booked guests on network and cable news.
“That is no longer the case,” said Matt Boyle, Washington bureau chief for Breitbart News. “We live in a 24/7 news cycle environment now, where new media and social media are dominant.”
“There’s a lot of people in the White House, like Karoline, who have grown up in the world of social media and the 24 hour news cycle environment,” Boyle said. “Having the new media and social media out there allows them to cut past the establishment media, and they don’t have to accommodate the losers in those places anymore.”
‘You Better Get Ready For What’s Going To Come Back To You’
(Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Cheeky videos are not the White House’s only way of unapologetically broasting its message. Cheung, who worked on all three Trump campaigns, has earned a reputation for mercilessly trashing opponents of the president online — a “take no prisoners strategy,” as Continetti puts it.
Eighty percent of the time he’ll respond to the media with “standard fare,”as Cheung calls it, typical statements or information about the president and his policies. But if you’re dealing with him in bad faith, “you better get ready for what’s going to come back to you,” Leavitt says.
“You, madam, are a blithering idiot,” he told a noisy Trump critic on X in late October. “You either have no idea what you are talking about or trying to peddle mis/disinformation to stay relevant. News flash— nobody will ever take you seriously. You are a joke.”
Late last month, as Air Force One returned from China, Cheung was enjoying views of the Northern Lights as he fired off insults at reporters. “Beta cuck vibes for a reporter to pitch a story about himself to the failing New York Times,” he said of Huffington Post’s S.V. Date, who got an Erik Wemple profile piece as an award for a recent back and forth with Cheung and Levitt.
He’s also unafraid to raise suspicions and rumors Washington thought it laid to rest — such as the rumor that Adam Kingzinger is secretly gay and used the gay dating app, GRINDR, or that a former CNN reporter, Michelle Koskinski, got highly-sensitive insider information through an affair with a British ambassador.
“Didn’t you get fired from CNN for banging a source?” Cheung asked Koskinski, who was linked to Britain’s (married) former ambassador to the United States, Kim Darroch, back in 2019 (both Koskinski and Darroch denied the affair).
“NO CUCKS,” he responded promptly when Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s husband, posted a selfie at a “No Kings” protest.
Asked how the president responds when he sees a fiery Cheung post, Leavitt grinned, suggesting the president’s attitude would be something like: that’s my boy, that’s classic Cheung.
“The president personally appreciates Steven’s style and the president looks to Steven when he needs someone to throw a punch for him,” Leavitt said. “He’s been very valued by everyone on the president’s team in that way for many years.”
Of course, President Trump himself first appealed to audiences on social media because he spoke in ways that were “understandable and down to earth and not pretentious or highfalutin,” Continetti pointed out. “The way that this current administration responds to critics is in that classic internet WWE no-holds-barred style.”
“That’s just kind of the price of entry into the online debate,” Continetti laughed. “Get ready for a left hook from Steven Cheung if you cross the administration or make a misstatement.”
This go around, the fighting spirit extends beyond Trump and his top enforcer.
On Thursday, citing reporters who sought to eavesdrop on administration conversations or snoop on the president unbeknownst to the White House team, Cheung announced that White House media would no longer be allowed to roam in and out of the West Wing offices where top officials like Cheung and Leavitt work. Instead, reporters will need to first make an appointment.
Cheung has also led the charge against reporters like Huffington Post’s S.V. Date, who they view as “partisan hacks” rather than legitimate journalists interested in truth-finding. When Date asked if the White House was aware of the “significance” of holding a meeting between Russia and Ukraine in Budapest, and, specifically, “who suggested Budapest?”
Cheung replied, “Your mom.” Leavitt hit the reporter with a slightly lengthier, “Your mom did,” and then added some context.
“It’s funny to me that you actually consider yourself a [journalist],” responded Leavitt. “You are a far left hack who nobody takes seriously, including your colleagues in the media, they just don’t tell you that to your face. Stop texting me your disingenuous, biased, and bullshit questions.”
She posted the full exchange on “X” for the public to see. That tweet alone is at almost 20 million views.
For context, S.V. Dáte of the Huffington Post is not a journalist interested in the facts. He is a left-wing hack who has consistently attacked President Trump for years and constantly bombards my phone with Democrat talking points.
Just take a look at @svdate’s feed, it reads… https://t.co/NxWn2mdUsa pic.twitter.com/v7owI5N4us
— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) October 20, 2025
“It’s interesting because Trump himself seems to be more specific in his targets,” Continetti reflected. “He’s not going after every single person…But because he has more people around him that he trusts and who understand the benefits of conflictual politics and combative rhetoric, he can be a little bit more selective in his own Truth Social posts.”
Boyle, a veteran reporter and longtime Trump insider, also argues that the team around Trump is more aligned with the president. Trump has never been apologetic, and has always been on offense, Boyle explained, “but look at some of the people he had to hire in the first term!”
“There were very few people around the president, when he first won, that truly understood what it is that he stands for, and understand the way that he communicates, the way that he fights for the issues that he wants to go for,” Boyle said. “And that’s why you would see disagreements inside the administration and leaks and all sorts of different stuff. This time around, you have a party that is firmly with him.”
Republicans on the whole are in a much stronger position now, Boyle says. The party is more “aggressively in line” with the president’s agenda, and the composition of the Republican conference is much better. Senators like Jim Banks, Bernie Moreno, and Tim Sheehy are “harder core Republicans” than what the GOP was dealing with the first time with Mitch McConnell running the show, he says.
‘I Don’t Think The Left Has Really Realized What We’re Doing Yet’
(Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
Keeping up with the unapologetic aggression of Trump means operating at a campaign pace.
“What’s so brand new about this administration is, we didn’t stop running a campaign when we signed up to be government workers,” Leavitt emphasized. “We are moving with that same speed and that same approach of pounding our message day after day after day.”
White House reporters certainly experience this. In the nine months of Trump 2.0, the news cycle has been a vicious pell-mell of economic, cultural, and political headlines, strung together by the daily activities of the President of the United States.
When legacy reporters flood press briefings with questions about Trump’s ballroom or defenses of the latest illegal criminal deportee, Leavitt surprises the briefing room with news from the podium, whether updates to the president’s schedule, policy proposals, or statements directly from the president himself.
Leavitt told The Daily Wire that providing “news value” in the briefings is very important to her. And she consistently hammers home the White House’s message of the day — most recently, that Democrats are hurting Americans with the “Schumer Shutdown.”
Video content and social media are a huge part of sending that message.
The deportation videos and posts, for example, rack up millions of views. Most of these posts are simply showing images of the deportees and describing their crimes: one March X post about Virginia Basora-Gonzalez described how the overweight illegal criminal, who had been previously deported and convicted of fentanyl trafficking, wept as she was arrested by ICE in Philadelphia after illegally reentering. The post hit 15 million views.
🇺🇸Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a previously deported alien felon convicted of fentanyl trafficking, was arrested by @ICEgov in Philadelphia after illegally reentering the U.S.
She wept when taken into custody (picture attached). pic.twitter.com/qwTpCgTRu9
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 18, 2025
Another White House post joked that “the only DEI we support” is “Deport Every Illegal.” That got a lofty 8.7 million views.
These posts make a major impact, according to a senior White House official involved in the team’s strategy. The social and digital teams aim to engage in dialogue with the public, starting conversations online about what the president is doing and how policy is impacting Americans.
“It’s our responsibility to meet the American voter and the American public where they are, speak their language, and not speak at the American people, but rather speak to them or speak with them and have conversations,” that official explained. “And I think we’ve done a really good job of doing that so far.”
A good example of that strategy in action: how the White House handled the newscycle of the “Maryland Man” Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who illegally entered the United States in 2011. He became the hero of those championing illegal immigration, including legacy media, though he was charged with human trafficking, was a member of MS-13, and had a restraining order for allegedly beating his wife.
Team Trump wasted no time in highlighting the man Democrats were defending. As legacy media attempted over and over to say that the White House was illegally deporting Abrego Garcia, the White House hammered home its message: this man was a threat to the public, he did not belong in the United States, and calling him a “Maryland Man” was absurd.
“Traditional administrations would have balked at that and really slowed down, and we put the pedal to the metal on it,” shared the senior White House official.
“I think we were responsible, as an administration, in causing [Maryland] Senator [Chris] Van Hollen into going to El Salvador and getting margaritas with the guy,” that official laughed. “I don’t think the Left has really realized what we’re doing yet.”
I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return. pic.twitter.com/U9y2gZpxCb
— Senator Chris Van Hollen (@ChrisVanHollen) April 18, 2025
And it’s hardly an accident that this “unapologetic” approach routinely gets Trump’s critics — both lawmakers and legacy media — whipped into a frenzy.
“That’s what we want,” Cheung explains. “That’s the game plan. I don’t think anyone realizes it. We want them to be spun up. We want them to talk about our rhetoric because it keeps them from talking about other things that may be important. It distracts them, and it gets them off kilter.”
“We don’t just do it to do it,” Cheung says. “There’s a strategy behind it.”
Leavitt says the White House is confident they are in possession of a “winning message.” And they’re going to keep pushing it.
“We campaigned on mass deporting illegal criminals, and it’s a winning message,” Leavitt says. “If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be sitting in the West Wing right now. They were fed up with the illegal alien invasion of the last four years, and they wanted drastic change, and that’s what the president is giving them.”
She adds simply: “We are, again, proud and unapologetic about what we’re doing.”
