KRISTI NOEM'S PRISON PHOTO OP WAS "SADDAM = BIN LADEN" 2.0

It's obvious that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's visit to El Salvador's brutal Cecot prison was part of the the Trump administration's effort to keep pumping out images of performative machismo in order to appeal to Trump's multi-ethnic, multi-generational coalition of male voters (a "badass" woman in skintight clothing is a familiar trope in male-coded popular culture):

The Trumpers know what boys like.

But there's more going on here, and it's not just that the administration wanted to change the subject from Signalgate. The Trumpers know how many stories have appeared challenging the notion that the immigrants who were rounded up and shipped to El Salvador a couple of weeks ago are all gang members. We know they were gang members because they had gang tattoos is a narrative they fear is falling apart.

NEW: @MotherJones reports that one of the men renditioned to El Salvador is Neri Alvarado, who was working in Dallas as a baker. An ICE agent told him they were questioning all men with tattoos.

Neri has an AUTISM AWARENESS TATTOO in honor of his 15-year-old brother with autism. pic.twitter.com/eufotQrax2

— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) March 26, 2025

So they posed Noem in front of shirtless men whose tattoos sure look like gang tattoos.

But we know from news reports that there are 10,000 to 20,000 prisoners at Cecot, and only 261 of them were sent there by the Trump administration. We also know from news reports that this prison held gang members long before Trump was inaugurated again. Here's a CNN report from last November:



So there's no reason to believe that the men in the photo op include any of Trump's 261 detainees. But the administration wants to send the message that they're the same men, and counter the message that men who were rounded up had innocuous tattoos, but without saying that the men posed behind Noem are Trump's detainees.

This is a propaganda approach that should be familiar to anyone who lived through the early 2000s. The Bush administration wanted to go to war with Iraq, and wanted Americans to believe that Saddam Hussein was linked to the 9/11 attack, but no one in the administration actually said in so many words that Saddam was the culprit. The link was always implied rather than stated, but it was implied incessantly:

From September 12, 2002, to May 2003, the subjects of terrorism and Iraq were intertwined on a regular basis. Of the 13 speeches given [by President George W. Bush] in this period, 12 referenced terror and Iraq in the same paragraph and 10 placed them within the same sentence. In 4 speeches, a discussion of terrorism preceded the first mention of Iraq, giving the impression that Iraq was a logical extension of the terrorism discussion....

Another notable construction in Bush’s speeches is the juxtaposition of Iraq/Saddam Hussein with September 11.... Seven of 13 speeches from September 2002 to May 2003, place September 11 and Iraq in the same paragraph, while four speeches place them in the same sentence. Three times in this period, Bush speeches proposed a hypothetical situation in which the September 11 hijackers were armed with WMD provided by the Iraqi government.

Noem and the Republican Party's principal communications outlet, Fox News, sent the message that the tattooed men behind Noem were the men the administration had rounded up without ever saying so explicitly.

Here's what viewers saw on Fox before the photo op took place:



The words at the beginning of this clip:

All right, it's happening today: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem will step foot in the El Salvador megaprison where the "worst of the worst" was deported from the U.S. two weekends ago, and they're being held at this hour.

After she arrived and did the photo op, Fox reported:

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem toured El Salvador's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center on Wednesday, where hundreds of alleged criminal illegal aliens are being held after the Trump administration deported them earlier this month....

Video of the tour showed Noem coming face to face with alleged members of Tren de Aragua, all of whom were shirtless and had shaved heads, while also donning white prison pants.

We'd watched the shaving of the Trump detainees' heads in mid-March, and they were wearing white uniforms, so Fox in this report Fox was connecting the tattooed men in the Noem photo op to the Trump detention without doing so explicitly.

Noem made a Tiktok-style vertical video:

She said:

I'm here at Cecot today visiting this facility, and, first of all, I want to thank El Salvador and their president for their partnership with the United States of America to bring our terrorists here and to incarcerate them and have consequences for the violence that they have perpetuated in our communities. I also want everybody to know, if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face. First of all, do not come to our country illegally. You will be removed and you will be prosecuted. But know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.

In this video, she never says that the men in tattoos who were posed behind her include any of the 261 people who were detained in America and renditioned to El Salvador. She doesn't have to. She calls them "terrorists," echoing Trump's executive order declaring Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization. She makes the link by implication.

So this meeting in February seems appropriate:



As the kids say, game recognizes game.