By Ella Ware
At a glance, the cartoon is familiar and nostalgic to almost every American. The bright yellow school bus with eyes for headlights, the beloved teacher with her smiling face and red, disheveled hair, driving the bus, her chameleon Liz riding shotgun. That is, until your eyes travel to the backseat of the bus where five men of color, hats covering their faces, sit side by side, handcuffed.
The text reads “The Magic Deportation Bus.” The image depicts the area around one of Liz’s arms as a jumbled mess. What was meant to approximate the original logo is noticeably off, and other signs suggest that the image was AI-generated. The caption? “Please let this be a normal field trip.”
The political cartoon is the most recent (now archived) post of many by the Trump Administration, defiling iconic pop culture for the purpose of promoting both ICE and the Iran war. Nothing is safe- from Spider-Man to Cars, to Franklin, to SpongeBob.
The White House staff’s post of the Magic School Bus mock-up was linked to a Fox News article about ICE’s latest raid “Operation Safe Community, Washington D.C.,” which began on Aug. 1 and ran for the next two weeks. By the end of the raid, 1,328 immigrants were arrested throughout Maryland and Virginia. Videos have been released showing people running from federal agents before being surrounded, handcuffed, and taken into custody.
It’s a sobering experience to see cartoons you loved and grew up with twisted to brag about our current administration’s atrocities on social media, and understandably, there’s been a lot of pushback.
Additionally, the White House has also been posting war and ICE videos set to pop music, much to the outrage of the artists. In Nov. 2025, the Department of Homeland Security and White House staff posted a video encouraging undocumented immigrants to voluntarily leave the US, using a segment of one of Olivia Rodrigo’s popular songs as the soundtrack.
Rodrigo responded by commenting on the post, “Don’t ever use my songs to promote your racist, hateful propaganda.”
The Trump administration has also tried to use Taylor Swift’s music in some of their posts, but copyright appeals quickly muted the song. Other artists like Katy Perry were “angry and appalled” when her song Firework was used, and the same thing happened to Ariana Grande, with her calling it “barbaric, inhumane, heinous nonsense.”
One thing that we as Americans truly hate is seeing the things that bring us joy and nostalgia being bastardized by our own government. It’s the definition of offensive for them to be marred by racism and hate.
My friends and I are in our 20s, and we talk about what an interesting time it is in our lives. We’ve moved out of our parents’ houses. We have to be grown-ups now, and we’re finally past being too cool to find joy in all of the things that made us so happy as children. My best friend’s room is littered with Hello Kitty because it was a simpler time. I have a Lightning McQueen sweater that I wear constantly. We’re protective of those memories.
It makes us angry to see the President of the United States of all people come for what should still be wholesome.
No one wants to hear their favorite song and think of these violent policies, or see their favorite cartoon from school and think of mass deportation. I can’t even imagine what it must feel like to spend time writing and creating music, pouring your heart into it, performing it in stadiums, only to hear it played over a video of military strikes. I would be just as pissed as they are, and I’m glad they’re taking action and making their voices heard.
I think that’s what everyone on social media is trying to do: have their voices heard.
It feels like screaming into the void, but when the President of the United States is posting AI “art” of our beloved Franklin the turtle firing a missile, we have to make our voices heard. I think part of us needs each other to bear witness to our words, just to hear each other out and say that none of this is remotely normal or okay.
