Donald Trump: Make AI-merica Great Again: Meme Lord Donald Trump’s digital feed goes off rails again
TOI correspondant from Washington: Somewhere between George Washington on horseback, a lunar conquest, and another imaginary demolition of Iran’s Kharg Island, the United States Presidency appeared to relocate from the White House to an AI image generator for several hours on Sunday.MAGA boss Donald Trump spent much of Sunday evening at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, conducting what can only be described as a digital variety show on Truth Social, unleashing a 37-post torrent of AI-generated images, videos, boasts, insults, and proposed geographic renovations. The performance ranged from the merely self-congratulatory and narcissistic to the geopolitically consequential – sometimes within the same minute.A review of Trump’s posts shows the afternoon descending into a surreal collage of AI slop: Trump meeting George Washington at the White House, Trump riding with him, Trump appearing at McDonald’s, Trump as Hulk Hogan, Trump surrounded by robots, and Trump standing beside a television displaying an edited image of Joe Biden.There was also a Space Force launched nuclear conflagration, a lunar image proclaiming, “The Moon Is Ours,” and a suggestion that New Mexico – a Pueblo nation that predates both the USA and Mexico – might henceforth be known as “New America.”Turning his attention to Iran, Trump imposed his face on the country and posted an AI-generated image involving demolition of Kharg Island. Trump’s previous AI depiction of its Kharg Island’s destruction prompted administration officials to explain it was intended as a message rather than an announcement of an actual US strike.That distinction – between a meme, a threat, a joke, and government policy — is now becoming increasingly difficult to maintain amid Trump’s social media mayhem. Sunday’s posts arrived amid renewed fighting around the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran is threatening additional restrictions after the US ramped up military pressure.Reuters reported Monday that Iran planned to announce a new restricted zone in the Gulf, while oil flows through the waterway remains a major source of global concern. So when the US president posts something about the Strait of Hormuz, the world is having a hard time determining whether it is comedy, propaganda, psychological warfare or an actual policy signal.At home, critics have been quick to interpret the Trump barrage of AI slop with alarm, some describing the latest outpouring as another “mental health episode” that calls for invoking the 25th Amendment, a constitutional mechanism to remove the President in the event of incapacity.Its involuntary provisions require the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to act, followed by a two-thirds vote of both chambers of Congress to remove the president if he contests the determination.No one seriously expects this to happen although the British Medical Journal reported in May that 30 US mental-health specialists had signed a statement declaring Trump mentally unfit for office and citing what they regarded as observable concerns about cognition, judgment and impulse control.But there is another interpretation of the President’s digital excesses: The Trump White House has increasingly operated as a social-media and influencer machine, using memes, videos and rapid-response posts to “drown out” opponents, generate viral attention, and overwhelm conventional news coverage.Trump’s defenders, in this interpretation, have portrayed his posts as trolling, baiting opponents, entertaining supporters and “keeping everyone else guessing.”But the problem, many analysts argue, is that the US President possesses something internet trolls do not: nuclear weapons, a powerful military, shadowy intelligence agencies, and the ability to move markets with a sentence. “It’s time to stop making excuses for President Trump, claiming that everything is a joke.“Joking” about choosing to launch nuclear war is evidence of dangerous detachment from any basic level of understanding his job,” one military vet raged on X.“It is time to acknowledge President Trump is suffering serious cognitive decline. We allow this to go on unchecked to our collective peril. If we don’t take constitutional measures to correct this deficiency while there is still time, we may invite destruction on ourselves,” he added.
