With almost 7 million people joining together and voicing their opposition to the current administration, the national discontent for President Trump’s authoritarian actions is undeniable, and a proper response from the president is more than warranted. While many would expect a powerful national leader to assure the people that their fears of authoritarianism are unfounded and that he has no intentions of crowning himself as king, President Trump took a much different approach. Trump decided instead to utilize artificial intelligence to generate a video where he, wearing a crown, flies a fighter jet and dumps mounds of feces on “No Kings” protesters.
Trump’s usage of generative AI or digital manipulation of videos to discredit and ridicule political opponents is not an isolated incident. On Sept. 29, with the approaching inevitability of a government shutdown, Trump posted an AI-generated video on X depicting Representative Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Chuck Schumer. In the video, Jeffries is wearing a sombrero and a mustache, while Schumer has a fake, dubbed voice describing how “nobody likes Democrats” and the obviously untrue methods that the video ascribes to the party. The artificially-manipulated Schumer then says, “If we give all these illegal aliens free healthcare, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us.”
Another egregiously distasteful example comes from the AI-created video of “Trump Gaza” posted on Feb. 25. This video shows a dichotomy between Gaza, currently ravaged with destruction, and the affluent and luxurious strip that would arise if Trump were to have his way with the Palestinian land. It also shows Elon Musk eating and dancing with money raining down around him, and President Trump reclining and drinking by a pool with Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. This outlandish video is not just a satirical commentary on foreign affairs, but scarily indicative of ideas and considerations that the president himself purports to be possible. Earlier in February, in a press conference with Netanyahu, Trump said, “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. Level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings. Level it out.”
Populist leaders across the globe have used this same AI approach. Geert Wilders from the Netherlands is a far-right member of the House of Representatives in the Netherlands whose social media pages are flooded with fake images and videos meant to satirize and comment on his political opposition. The party he heads, the Party for Freedom, is notoriously Islamophobic, and Wilders consistently utilizes AI to feed the flames of this sentiment. These include AI-generated images of white people being harassed by people of color, such as Muslim women in hijabs and niqabs surrounding a white woman in a supermarket. Immigration is at the forefront of many framing strategies by far-right populist leaders, and the decision to use AI-generated images showing white people and white culture threatened by Islam and Muslim people plays into the zero-sum, exclusionary rhetoric Wilders’s party thrives on. Wilders and his social media posts all contribute to the same far-right narrative that the Netherlands can preserve its whiteness or it can accept what he condemns as “mass immigration,” “Islamisation,” and “backwardness of the Dutch.”
Bret Schafer, a senior fellow in media and digital disinformation at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, describes the effects of emerging digital advancements and platforms on political communication, saying, “The use of memes and the use of what we used to consider stuff that would exist in the worlds of Reddit, now has drifted into the discourse of elected leaders. I don’t think it is good for our kind of political discourse in this country to adopt the online style of podcasters, vloggers, and partisan communicators.”
Trump’s use of AI to respond to protestors should not be blown off as a laughable and irreverent occurrence; it should be realized for the microcosm of satirical extremism that it is. AI is not just a helpful tool to cram in studying when you forget an exam is tomorrow, or a fun way to create visually-realistic scenarios with Sora. It is a tool actively being used by prominent political—and primarily populist—figures to take advantage of the youth-oriented cultural zeitgeist surrounding the technology and sow discord and dissent against political opposition or perceived antagonists in their construction of the people.
Student of Political Science, fan of Severance, lover of the Slushynoobz
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