Upon navigating to WhiteHouse.gov, the official website for the happenings and history of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, users are met with a banner at the top of the page, “Democrats Have Shut Down the Government,” it reads, with an active timer tick-tick-ticking away, counting, to the second, how long the shutdown has been going on.
Of an estimated 1.4 million government workers, roughly half are considered essential workers, and are currently performing their jobs without pay, while the other half have been furloughed. The government isn’t working at capacity, and the executive branch would like you to know exactly who they’d like to blame.
Apparently, online trolling falls under the “essential” category, as a longstanding page about the White House grounds’ history was updated recently with renderings and statements about Donald Trump’s demolition and rebuild of the East Wing to make way for a very large ballroom, as well as a timeline of “major events” in the building’s history.
The events highlighted on the page make sense at first, beginning with George Washington selecting the future site of the White House in 1791, the 1814 burning of the building and subsequent rebuilding, and so on. It’s mostly porticos and additions from there, welcoming the Rose Garden and the Briefing Room to the party, until you scroll to 1998, when the definition of “major events” takes an abrupt turn in the first entry after Richard Nixon’s bowling alley addition in 1973.
“Bill Clinton Scandal: President Bill Clinton‘s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky was exposed, leading to White House perjury investigations,” the caption beneath an archival photo of Clinton and Lewinsky in the Oval Office reads. “The Oval Office trysts fueled impeachment for obstruction.”
The next entry takes us to 2012’s “Muslim Brotherhood Visit,” describing President Barack Obama (informally referred to only as “Obama”) hosting members of “a group that promotes Islamist extremism and has ties to Hamas” and describes it as a terrorist organization.
Lest you think the timeline is all scandal, users next see a recap of the biggest, most memorable headline to come out of 2020. If you think that’s the Covid-19 pandemic, try again. Of course, it’s Melania Trump’s South Lawn tennis pavilion, which “unifies the tennis court, Children’s Garden, and Kitchen Garden, enhancing recreational opportunities for First Families.” If that’s not major, it’s hard to say what is.
From there, the trolling of the Democrats continues, including a photo of Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, shirtless and smoking a cigarette, above a caption speculating about whether a bag of cocaine found in a highly trafficked public area of the White House belonged to him, as well as a typo-ridden entry about the establishment of the Transgender Day of Visibility under Biden. (Trump’s White House also recently raised eyebrows for hanging a photo of an autopen in place of a portrait of Biden.)
Missing are any references to the two times Trump has been impeached, or Nixon’s resignation in the wake of the Watergate scandal—all arguably worthy of the timeline, if other meetings on the grounds and impeachment processes qualified.
Kaelan Dorr, a deputy assistant to the president and communications staffer at the Trump White House, posted on his official White House social media account Thursday, pointing to these new updates on the page.
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“Some easter eggs on the White House site for the wannabe historians on social media,” he wrote alongside a screenshot of part of the timeline. “Enjoy :)”
Archived snapshots of the page show that the update was made sometime between October 7, 2025, and October 23, 2025. The government shutdown began on October 1, strictly limiting the capabilities and staffing of government agencies. The White House website is maintained by the Office of Digital Strategy, which flows up into the Executive Office of the President.
A September 30, 2025 shutdown planning document from the Executive Office of the President explained that EOP staffers whose work is “necessary to protect against imminent threats to the safety of human life or the protection of property, including robustly monitoring potential pandemics, developing strategic responses, and providing cybersecurity and information technology services” would continue in their duties, as well as those who “support the President and Vice President in executing their constitutional responsibilities.”
Does embedding an image of Hunter Biden fall under the category of constitutional responsibility, or would that be an imminent threat to the safety of human life?
On Thursday, Dorr responded to a tweet from Axios that said these White House website updates were being used “to demean Democrat presidents,” writing that “the Left is now defending some pretty gnarly stuff.”
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The update is atypical in the website’s history: The earliest archived versions of the page date back to December 2017. From then until earlier this month, archived snapshots of the page show that the information on the page has been largely unchanged for the past seven-plus years (though photos and page layouts have been updated). Until recent days, the site only held the text that begins below the new timeline, a brief history of the White House and a few fun facts. (Did you know there are 412 doors and 28 fireplaces in the Residence? Now you do, and the page has told you so since 2017.)
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” Jock Gill, who worked within the Clinton administration to bring email to the White House, and established the very website in question, WhiteHouse.gov, in October 1994, tells Vanity Fair with a sigh when the new content was described to him.
One of his listed goals pushing White House technology forward was providing transparency and context for the president’s work, and access to the White House, including content to tell people about the building and its history. “Each administration, far as I can tell, shapes the website to reflect their their values and their goals, their objectives.”
Gill and his colleagues hoped advances in internet usage and technology would be a boon for transparency and citizen participation, even working on digital tours of the White House to involve people more. To him, it was as symbolic as it was practical. “We were optimistic. It was the People’s House, and we were trying to get as many people into it and make it as open and welcoming and public facing as possible.”
Still, Gill isn’t sold that the other party would have a better strategy than MAGA. “The problem for me is the best the Democrats can do, as far as I can tell, [is] send me all sorts of clickbait mail asking for money.”
The White House Press Office did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.
The post Trump’s White House Trolls Democrats With Some Choice Website Updates appeared first on Vanity Fair.
