ISLAMABAD: The official White House account this week posted an AI-generated image of President Donald Trump striding across a frozen landscape toward Greenland, hand-in-wing with a penguin carrying a US flag.
The caption was brief and cryptic: “Embrace the penguin.”
Shared on X, the post raced past 30 million views, igniting confusion, mockery, and rapid-fire debate across platforms.
Trump’s penguin post landed against the backdrop of renewed US interest in Greenland.
Earlier this week, the president said there is a “framework of a future deal” involving the semi-autonomous Danish territory, arguing Greenland is critical to US security plans, including a proposed “Golden Dome” missile defense system, and to access strategic minerals essential for modern technology.
But the problem, critics quickly noted, was zoological, not political.
Penguins simply do not live in Greenland, the Arctic, or anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Every penguin species exists exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere, primarily in Antarctica.
“There are no penguins in Greenland,” the account PatriotTakes wrote, adding: “Perhaps you shouldn’t have dismantled the Department of Education so quickly.”
Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi offered a shorter correction: “Wrong hemisphere.”
Others went sharper. Conservative commentator Erick Erickson joked that the administration “must be planning to invade Antarctica.”
Danish MP Rasmus Jarlov delivered the harshest line: “The message from the White House is clear: Trump belongs in Greenland as much as penguins do.”
Some users interpreted the image as a nod to the “nihilist penguin” meme circulating online, inspired by Werner Herzog’s 2007 documentary, "Encounters at the End of the World." The film features an Adélie penguin walking alone toward the Antarctic mountains. A moment Herzog famously frames as a doomed, existential march.
The White House did not immediately clarify the intent of the post. The Department of Homeland Security later shared a related image, reinforcing the impression that the symbolism was intentional rather than accidental.
A familiar pattern
The episode fits a broader pattern in Trump’s online presence since returning to office. He remains one of the most prolific political figures on social media, regularly pushing out memes, AI-generated images and content engineered for virality alongside policy messaging.
A recent Wired investigation reported that Trump personally types roughly 5% of his posts. The rest are produced by aides, including Natalie Harp and Dan Scavino, who convert the president’s dictation into a steady stream of attention-grabbing content.
“The entire ethos and aesthetic of this administration is spectacle and subversion of norms,” Dannagal Young, director of the Center for Political Communication at the University of Delaware, told CNN. “You don’t do that through deliberation or argument, but through symbols.”
TikTok politics, penguin edition
Trump’s meme-forward strategy is widely seen as an attempt to connect with younger audiences. During the 2024 campaign, his TikTok account became one of the platform’s fastest-growing, tapping into Gen Z’s preference for visual, ironic and remixable content.
The penguin post shows both the upside and downside of that approach. It captured massive attention, but lost narrative control almost instantly, as users reframed it through jokes, fact-checks and satire.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson defended the strategy in a statement to CNN, saying:
“The success of the White House’s social media pages speak for itself. Through engaging posts and banger memes, we are successfully communicating the President’s extremely popular agenda.”
For the internet, though, the takeaway was simpler: if the White House wanted everyone talking, the penguin delivered, even if it waddled in from the wrong hemisphere.
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