The White House posted a four-image Spider-Man carousel to Instagram on August 6, captioned “Your friendly neighborhood ICE agents,” showing Spider-Man’s webbing snapping around a line of handcuffed detainees under the caption “Criminal Illegal Aliens Will Be Caught and Deported.” The timing wasn’t subtle. Spider-Man: Brand New Day had just crossed $1 billion at the global box office, and the administration’s social team clearly couldn’t resist riffing on the biggest movie in theaters.
It’s the second time in two years the White House has hijacked a DC or Marvel release for an immigration meme. Last year’s Superman rollout got the same treatment with a Trump-as-Superman graphic, a bit that landed right after James Gunn told an interviewer his film’s hero was an immigrant, a comment that had a chunk of the online right ready to write off the movie before it even opened. This time the administration skipped the culture-war framing and went straight for the joke, and the joke works. Spider-Man catching bad guys in a web is, definitionally, what Spider-Man does.
The comment section did the rest of the work. One user demanded Marvel and Sony “get off their damn knees and take legal action immediately.” Another insisted Spider-Man “would take down ICE and that shit fascist president in one night,” apparently forgetting Spider-Man is not, in fact, real. RuPaul’s Drag Race alum Shuga Cain went with “No one is illegal on stolen land,” which is certainly a sentence. Someone else invoked the ghost of Stan Lee directly, confident the late Marvel legend, a man who spent decades cheerfully licensing his characters to whoever cut the biggest check, would have drawn a hard line at a government Instagram meme.
Others started posting claiming that Disney needs to sue the White House, as if that could be done over a parody social media post.
The bit also isn’t new. Homeland Security ran a Pokémon-themed ICE post last September set to the anime’s own theme song, and has previously worked in Yu-Gi-Oh! and Dragon Ball references too, each time triggering the exact same cycle of demands for lawsuits that never materialize. A White House spokesperson leaned into it rather than backing down, telling one outlet that critics triggered by the use of a fictional character to generate viral conversation ought to ask themselves whether Spider-Man would side with the “dangerous criminal illegal aliens” the administration is working to remove.
Snopes ran a formal fact-check confirming the post is real, which tells you everything about how hard the online left melted down over a meme rather than just laughing or scrolling past. TMZ rounded up commenters demanding Disney and Sony sue the federal government over a fan-art-tier Instagram carousel. One outlet dug up an old Spider-Man comic where Peter Parker helps an undocumented immigrant, presenting it as some kind of gotcha, as if a fictional teenager’s fictional legal opinions from a 2010s comic run settle a real immigration debate. Euronews ran a full piece on the backlash. None of it registers as anything other than a very online joke landing exactly the way it was built to land, with the people it was built to annoy walking straight into the bit.
Is a White House meme team out here doing better bits than most late-night writers’ rooms, or has outrage culture just gotten so predictable that trolling it has become the easiest content strategy in Washington?
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