“Don’t recall ever seeing a WH do this,” remarked Huffington Post White House reporter Christina Wilkie. “Some might call it Propaganda,” NBC News’ Katy Tur averred. “I didn’t totally expect the 1984-esque dystopian future to be so soon, but life comes at ya fast,” snarked the Center for American Progress’s economist Katie Bahn. But this, too, is not an unparalleled abuse of the public trust; at least, not for those who remember how the Obama administration sold the public on the Iran nuclear accords in 2015.

The Obama administration’s “blog” content (now maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration), which includes former Press Secretary Josh Earnest’s “Regional Roundup: What America’s Newspapers are Saying About the Iran Deal.” The blog consisted entirely of favorable headlines from around the country reciting verbatim (and false) administration claims about the nuclear accord. “The Iran Deal” even had its own Twitter account which disseminated not only favorable press mentions but also crafted insipid pop culture memes to get the millennial generation jazzed about nuclear non-proliferation. Imagine the anxiety among journalists when the Trump White House mirrors this tactic.