A White House feed flooded with taunts of opponents and beatification of its allies. An F.C.C. chairman using a GIF to answer a question from the news media. An F.B.I. director who posts potential evidence from a shooting and news of a high-profile arrest on X.

During the first nine months of Donald J. Trump’s extremely online administration, the president’s always-be-posting style has been adopted and echoed by a coterie of top aides who have embraced online tactics, replacing longstanding governmental norms with ones native to the internet.

That includes a steady stream of trolling, memes and A.I.-generated images from officials and on government websites, including what they called A.S.M.R. videos of prisoners in chains, Ghiblified cartoons of the administration’s deportation efforts, and a repost of an “Apocalypse Now” inspired image suggesting the president would wage a “war” in Chicago.

In the last month alone, that brash and sometimes casual social media attitude has ricocheted through the national debate on an almost daily basis, including the federal budget negotiations, during which both Mr. Trump and the White House have posted A.I.-generated images depicting Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York with a mustache and a sombrero, which Mr. Jeffries said was racist.

Similar gibes have also suffused messages from formerly staid agencies like the Federal Communications Commission, where its chairman, Brendan Carr, offered up smiling Jack Nicholson GIFs and clips from “The Office” to celebrate late night television host Jimmy Kimmel’s temporary suspension; the Department of Homeland Security, with its Pokemon-themed video and a “Mean Girl” meme to promote deportation efforts; and the F.B.I., where its director, Kash Patel, recently used his feed to post a series of watermelon emojis to mock Senator Adam Schiff of California, calling back to Mr. Trump’s remarks on the senator’s looks.

“They’re aggressive and loud and constantly on the attack,” said Hamilton Nolan, a journalist who recently wrote about the phenomenon on Substack, adding, “It’s like turning the entire government into a message board argument.”

Social media experts say that the second Trump administration’s efforts have far outstripped previous presidents, including Democrats like President Biden, who had his own Office of Digital Strategy, and President Obama, widely considered an innovator, using the internet to organize and advertise to supporters.

They are a natural outgrowth of Mr. Trump’s own online habits — which touch on a dizzying array of topics, from mocking the Rev. Al Sharpton to attacking solar farms — as well as an administration stocked with experienced influencers, steeped in internet culture and armed with a keen sense of their supporters’ taste for virtual battle. The breakneck pace of technological changes — including A.I., and rampant and sometimes malicious use of bots, including by overseas adversaries — have only amplified that megaphone’s reach.

Taken as a whole, the emphasis and use of such methods by the Trump team has often been effective in defining the terms of the national debate and controlling the political narrative, all while scoring points on their opponents.

“As an overall communications strategy, trolling the libs has proven to be more politically, culturally and economically successful than NOT trolling the libs,” said Whitney Phillips, an associate professor of information politics and media ethics at the University of Oregon, who has written extensively about the practice of putting down one’s opponents, noting that Mr. Trump “built his brand on top of those dynamics.”

The political attacks coming from the White House social media feeds has continued during the shutdown, with additional sombrero-themed postings this week. (The Atlantic, a left-leaning magazine, called the deadlocked situation “the meme shutdown.”) Those official postings have then been shared on other platforms, all with the imprimatur of the federal government.

Those anti-Democratic Party postings — and others on different government websites — have been sharply criticized as potential violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits the federal work force from engaging in political activity on the job. Official social media feeds are manned by federal employees and thus are paid for by taxpayers.

In a statement, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said that “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,” Ms. Jackson said, adding, “There’s a reason so many people try to copy our style — our message resonates.”

The White House declined to state which staffers are creating the posts coming out of the Trump administration, though one that appeared on the president’s Truth Social feed last week — depicting Russell Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, as the Grim Reaper tormenting Democrats — was credited to the Dilley 300 Meme Team. The Dilley Meme team, which calls itself “Trump’s online war machine,” was founded by Brenden Dilley, a onetime Republican congressional candidate, who described his methodology in simple terms on a podcast he hosts: “It doesn’t have to be true,” he said. “It just has to go viral.”

Combative and rarely, if ever, apologetic

The Republican Party is not alone in its use of social media, of course, though Democrats are often thought of as being less agile in the arena. And indeed, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have also been posting shutdown-inspired confrontation videos with their colleagues in recent days.

In a recent interview, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, said “we’re also dealing with the social media,” which, he said, his party “didn’t do enough of, frankly, in the past.” (That sentiment struck many online commenters as flat-footed.)

There are exceptions: Democrats like Zohran Mamdani, who is the party’s candidate for New York City mayor, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York have been credited for effectively conveying messages — and getting laughs at the expense of their opponents.

On Sunday, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez asked her 9.4 million Instagram followers to make fun of “the puffery of insecure masculinity” that she sees at the heart of the Trump administration, including top aide Stephen Miller whose height she mocked, saying “he looks like he’s, like, 4-10.”

“And he looks like he is angry about the fact that he’s 4-10,” the congresswoman quipped, while knitting. (Mr. Miller is listed as being a foot taller than that.)

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s tweaking of MAGA masculinity has also been picked up by another Democrat, Representative Eric Swalwell of California, who used Sabrina Carpenter’s song “Manchild” in a taunting post on Wednesday.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California has been praised by fellow Democrats for mocking Mr. Trump’s often hyperbolic social media, including the president’s all-caps punctuation. Recent efforts by Mr. Newsom have included painting Representative Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, as a cartoon Minion, and an A.I.-video of Vice President JD Vance giving a discussion on the “history of couches,” a reference to an obscene joke from last year’s campaign.

Like the Trump team, those making Mr. Newsom’s mocking posts have largely remained anonymous, credited only to a small group of aides, with input from the governor himself, according to his office.

“Governor Newsom has spent years consuming right-wing media — and now he’s turning their own playbook against them,” said Izzy Gardon, a spokesman. “He’s holding up a mirror to MAGA, and it appears they hate what they see.”

Still, Mr. Trump is widely considered to have mastered a format well-suited to his idiosyncratic style: perpetually combative, bent on winning the day or even just the moment, and rarely, if ever, apologetic.

And unlike the people around him during his first term, many of the key players in Mr. Trump’s second-term are savvy on social media, drawn as they are from the worlds of television and the internet. That list includes Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host; Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, an avid online Trump supporter who opened up the White House press room to podcasters and influencers; and even his nominee for Surgeon General, Casey Means, a wellness influencer.

“Mike Pence was not an internet troll,” Ms. Phillips said.

Jonathan Nagler, the co-director of the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University, said that Mr. Trump was deft at online warfare, saying “it’s a great medium for him,” noting his taste for put-downs and pop-culture shout-outs.

Mr. Trump also, of course, founded his own social-media platform — Truth Social — and has benefited from the support of Elon Musk, the owner of X.com. Since taking control of X, Mr. Musk has removed some previous prohibitions on fake or misleading speech, something Mr. Trump has been accused of fostering, including his recent sharing on Truth Social of a post about “medbeds,” a fictional device which is supposed to magically cure ailments. (He later deleted it.)

“Politics equals trolling”

The online nature of the Trump administration also reflects the broader nature of many internet interactions, particularly political ones: fast, snappy and cutting — and not always factually correct.

“Things move on so quickly that if you have a rebuttal or a fact check, we’ve already moved on, the culture is at a different place,” said Adam Aleksic, a linguist and author of “Algospeak,” a book about the impact of internet on language. “All that matters is getting your message out there further. And that means playing into extreme stuff, stuff that generates comments, stuff that plays into current trends, all of that.”

That social media strategy has not always landed, even with some of Mr. Trump’s supporters. In recent months, some have responded to the administration’s social media posts demanding for the release of the Epstein files. Concerns have also been raised that Mr. Trump’s aides’ devotion to him — and online tactics — have created an echo chamber, divorced from real-world concerns.

In other instances, they’ve seemingly imperiled prosecutions or investigations. Last month, a federal judge in Manhattan cited two high-ranking Justice Department officials for making online comments about Luigi Mangione, accused of killing a health insurance executive in Manhattan last year, for potentially interfering with a fair trial. Mr. Patel was also criticized for posting news of a false report of an early arrest in the Charlie Kirk case.

Theo Von, a prominent podcaster and comedian whose interviews with Mr. Trump during the campaign helped woo young male voters, also recently took issue with a post from the Department of Homeland Security, demanding they stop using him in a video highlighting past comments he’s made, shortly after it posted a video celebrating deportations.

“Please take this down and please keep me out of your ‘banger’ deportation videos,” wrote Mr. Von. “When it comes to immigration my thoughts and heart are a lot more nuanced than this video allows.”

In online warfare, compromise is not popular, said Christopher Bail, the co-director of the Polarization Lab at Duke University.

“That leaves a lot of real estate for a small group of highly engaged, and typically much more radical people, who unfortunately create the broad-scale misperception that most people share their radical views,” he said.

He added: “For a while there, I think a lot of people would say, ‘Oh yeah, there’s just some loud people online. But now, you know, the loud people online are really calling the shots.”

Experts say the adoption of online methods by Trump’s aides somewhat mirror the rollicking and often aggressive atmosphere that often imbued his campaign rallies, with commentators undercutting serious expressions of opinion.

“It’s as if we have an administration of reply guys,” said Shannon C. McGregor, a principal investigator at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina, referring to chronic online posters.

And the attitude of “nothing matters” may serve a secondary goal, she added, making it acceptable for backers of the president’s policies to cheer videos of masked men making arrests, for example.

“That, I think, is a purposeful tactic,” Ms. McGregor said, allowing his supporters “to enjoy, and to feel that permission to enjoy, what’s going on, but also to really undermine the seriousness of the impact. And I think that’s also a really, very chronically extremely online sentiment.”

Even critics like Mr. Nolan concede that the Trump social media army is effective in “competing in that particular arena, in the Twitter arena basically.”

But, he added, the worry is about the long-term effects of that focus, noting that during Mr. Trump’s first term “there was still a bureaucracy in place that was actually running the government while he could do his performances.

“Now it’s like the operational bureaucratic class of the government has been purged,” he said. “And it’s a completely performative class.”

Ms. Phillips, the trolling expert at the University of Oregon, said her students believe that “politics equals trolling,” and that makes it “extra challenging if you’re trying to call attention to something being historically unprecedented.”

“Because,” she said, “everything is precedented.”