Franklin Roosevelt mastered the use of radio. John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were top of the game on TV. And Donald Trump is the first AI slop president.
Since January, Trump’s administration has used artificial intelligence to churn out a steady stream of fake images on social media, from alligators in ICE hats to crying members of Congress,while the official White House account on X has used it to portray the president as Superman, the pope and a villain from “Star Wars.”
Earlier this week, Trump used his account on his personal social media platform, Truth Social, to share an AI-generated clip showing former President Barack Obama being forcibly detained by the FBI. As bizarre as it was, it fit in with his other nonsensical memes, which included various Democrats in orange prison jumpsuits as the “Shady Bunch” and a fake-looking video of a woman in a bikini catching a snake with her bare hands.
There’s a term for someone using social media this way that can’t be repeated in polite company, so let’s just call it slop-posting. It’s usually done by a 14-year-old boy, or someone who still acts like one, and it’s mostly just absurd or mildly offensive. It’s not harmless, necessarily, but it’s mostly just lame trolling.
But when the president does it, it’s something else entirely. Even in the most harmless AI-generated memes, Trump is muddying the waters on what is real, encouraging his supporters to believe everything and nothing. Did a woman in a bikini really catch a snake? Is Obama really going to be arrested? To a Trump supporter steeped in these memes, the answer may not even matter.
The president is supposed to be the ultimate consumer of facts, not a producer of falsehoods.
Still, reality matters. The White House is supposed to be the command center of a vast machinery of intelligence agents, analysts and military strategists who come together every day to figure out what is really happening in the world so that the president can make an informed decision. The president is supposed to be the ultimate consumer of facts, not a producer of falsehoods.
That isn’t always the case, of course. Presidents have lied or cited false evidence in the past, but they paid a price. It became a huge scandal when the president said that a U.S. ship in the Gulf of Tonkin was attacked, that he did not know anything about a break-in at the Watergate, that he did not have sexual relations with that woman or that Iraq sought yellowcake uranium.
A sitting president posting a falsified video of a former president would have been a much bigger deal just a few years ago, but at this point, we are all so tired. Trump has made it his mission to blame everyone else for the problems he’s created, going so far Tuesday as to accuse Obama of “treason” and continuing to push the conspiracy that the left rigged the past two elections.
Obama, who typically tries to remain above the fray, even came out against this latest shock, stating through a spokesperson that while his office normally ignores the “constant nonsense and misinformation” coming from the Trump White House, the “bizarre allegations” of election-rigging are “ridiculous” and a “weak attempt at distraction.”
Outside of the United States, fake images have long been a tool of autocratic governments. In the then-Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin had photographs retouched to remove his political rivals, make himself look more attractive and make his crowds seem larger than they were. In more modern times, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un have photoshopped out their blemishes and tweaked their PR appearances to boost their reputations.
Not every use of altered media was nefarious. According to the Walt Disney Archives, the company’s namesake never wanted to be photographed with a cigarette in his hand, although he was a prolific smoker who ended up dying of lung cancer. Over the years, the company he helped create systematically removed cigarettes from old photos of Walt Disney to avoid encouraging children to take up the habit. These efforts used to take weeks. These days, Marvel can casually insert the Red Guardian into archival video of a Soviet parade in an afternoon. What was once a painstaking tool of an authoritarian government is now a quick CGI moment of comic relief. The technology is becoming cheaper, easier to use and more realistic every day. Not that long ago, the best AI could do was a bizarro version of Will Smith eating spaghetti. Not that long ago, the best AI could do was a bizarro version of Will Smith eating spaghetti. Now, the only clues a video is fake are its awkward handling of fingers or flubbed lettering. Those problems will be solved soon enough. There are two risks. One is that malevolent forces disseminate a fake video that is widely believed, leading to real-world consequences. (Wars have been launched on far less believable evidence than you can see routinely on social media these days.) The other is that people stop believing video entirely. The next time video leaks of prisoners of war being tortured or a presidential candidate bragging about committing sexual assault, many Americans may just shrug and say it’s fake. The world that Trump is helping create is one in which you can’t trust anyone, facts are fungible and the truth is whatever your political side says it is. That world helps people in power; it only hurts the rest of us.
Steven Asarch
Steven Asarch is a perpetually online digital culture writer who has written for Business Insider and Rolling Stone, among other outlets. 
