For them, the entire situation is a massive joke, serving as material for memes that galvanize their base even as they alienate the majority of Americans from Trump’s severe immigration policies.

Laura Loomer, a close ally of Trump’s, was thrilled at the potential of escapees meeting their demise. “The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we start now,” she posted on X. (This number refers to the United States’ entire Latino population, not the estimated count of undocumented immigrants). Conservative pundit Benny Johnson likened the facility’s entrance to Jurassic Park and boasted about acquiring official Alligator Alcatraz merchandise during his visit. (Prior to his rightward shift, and before he was dismissed from BuzzFeed for plagiarism, Johnson also drew comparisons between the Arab Spring and Jurassic Park. It’s uncertain if he’s familiar with any other films.) One Republican Congress member is also selling Alligator Alcatraz merchandise to support her reelection campaign. Additional merchandise is available on Etsy. Naturally, there’s also a themed cryptocurrency.

The memes and merch are more than a get-rich-quick scheme for enterprising nativists, though grift is obviously always part of the MAGA equation. In his second term, Trump has turned immigration enforcement into a spectator sport. Far-right influencers like Chaya Raichik, better known as Libs of TikTok, have been invited to ride-alongs with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has turned her position into a sort of cowboy cop cosplay, often appearing in public in a bulletproof vest or a ten-gallon hat (or sometimes both). The official White House X account is posting “deportation ASMR” and Studio Ghibli-fied images of crying migrants in handcuffs.

There’s a real glee to it. To borrow from Adam Serwer, the cruelty is the point, but there’s more to it than that. At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Vice President JD Vance said that voters had given Trump a mandate on immigration enforcement; Trump won the popular vote in part because the public was clamoring for mass deportations. It’s true that before the 2024 election, most voters expressed disapproval with President Joe Biden’s border policy and seemed open to a more hardline approach to immigration. But Trump — and the zoomers presumably running the White House’s social media — either haven’t realized that public opinion is no longer on his side with regard to immigration, or they simply don’t care.

Trump seems even less beholden to public opinion in his second term than he was in his first. Since January, he has pursued deeply unpopular policies, from tariffs to completely gutting the federal government, so relentlessly that he has even lost support from his own base. Half a year into Trump’s second term, it’s clear that voters agreed with some of his proposals in abstract terms — they elected him because he promised to “do something about immigration” and “run the government like a business” — but don’t like how these policies have played out in practice.

A chunk of Republican voters have turned against tariffs and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Still other Trump supporters have seen their friends, relatives, and spouses targeted by ICE since the president’s return to office. One naturalized citizen who voted for Trump was even stopped by ICE agents while driving to work; he now believes that ICE is racially profiling Latinos. He told a local news station that he voted for Trump because he would be targeting “criminals, not every Hispanic, Spanish-look-alike.” Trump’s approval rating on immigration is now down to 41 percent, the lowest since his second term began. Voters may have trusted Trump to get “criminals” out of the country, but they weren’t necessarily expecting his administration to indiscriminately target noncitizens (and some citizens as well), deploy the National Guard to arrest immigrants and crack down on protesters in Los Angeles, or disappear hundreds of people to a Salvadoran megaprison.

In a post on X, White House adviser Stephen Miller justified the decision to sic the National Guard on protesters by saying that “America voted for mass deportations.” Recent polling suggests that Americans are no longer on board with Trump’s immigration agenda. Rather than responding to this shift in voters’ sentiment, the administration appears to be doubling down on its all-or-nothing approach to immigration enforcement and to its gleeful depictions of these draconian policies online. The memes create a sort of alternate reality, a virtual universe in which everyone is still on the Trump Train and all Americans are thrilled at the prospect of feeding immigrants to alligators. This echo chamber benefits from — and is amplified by — algorithmic silos. Your average voter may read about Alligator Alcatraz in the news, but they aren’t necessarily seeing Benny Johnson’s concentration camp selfies. The memes are in-group signaling; they engender a sense of belonging for Trump’s most ardent supporters while inuring them to the cruelty of this new era. The memes are politics disjointed from polls and demagoguery free of democracy, a sign that the White House — either out of recklessness or something much worse — does not care about elections.