The images spread as they do because, taken together, they can seem to reveal hidden truths about a president who remains, for all his spotlighting and swaggering, a cipher. This is an era, after all, in which the American public, primed with Making a Murderer and American Crime Story and NCIS, embraces forensic analysis as a form of entertainment. In that context, each new image of the president, and each image of the people and things surrounding him, takes on not only the quality of art—provocative, illustrative, asking to be analyzed—but also the quality of a mystery. Each is a new episode of CSI: White House. Each image treats the Trump presidency as a kind of Mona Lisa in live action, faintly grinning at one moment and faintly grimacing at the next—an aesthetic embodiment of the hazy ambiguity Italians call sfumato. “Donald Trump, Hiding in Plain Sight” was the headline of The New Yorker’s evaluation of 2017’s Scotch Tape on Tie.

It’s an aesthetic approach encouraged by the president himself—a man who, on top of everything else, seems to be exceptionally oriented toward the visual. Trump delights in providing his own art to be analyzed: that GIF of him driving his golf ball into Hillary’s turned back. The one of him wrestling “CNN” to complacency. The one of “the Trump train,” running over a cartoonish person onto whose head was photoshopped the logo of, yep, CNN. They are on the one hand very good distractions from the actual workings and non-workings of the administration—smoke and mirrors with an Adult Swim twist. But the president’s GIF-happiness achieves a broader end, as well: It frames him, the reality star, in precisely the way he seems to prefer to be known—as an aesthetic figure more even than a political one. It figures Trump himself as a work of art. One of the narratives that has emerged about the president in the months since he took office is that he enjoys the trappings of the job but not the work of it. Here is yet more evidence of that, via a GIF that suggests what might happen were Thomas the Tank Engine to go murder-y: Trump, it seems, wants to be looked at more than he wants to be looked to.

In his 1998 book The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word, the NYU professor Mitchell Stephens argued that, in the digital age, images—moving images, in particular—would come to supplant words as the primary mode of human communication. We are far, still, from such a wholesale shift, but the Trump presidency nonetheless hints at the change: This is a moment in which even the most casual of images can take on an air of revelation, and in which the images surrounding the president can be seen as more trustworthy than the words coming from the president himself. Images have a certain magic to them, Stephens noted; part of the magic derives from their ability to present the world in its multiple dimensions. Words can lie in ways that pictures cannot.