President Donald Trump, a septuagenarian known for his general avoidance of keyboards and computers, has somehow become America’s first generative AI president.
The most infamous example of his experimentation with AI-generated videos came ahead of the No Kings protests earlier this month. In the clip, the president is decked out in full Top Gun gear, piloting a fighter jet bearing “KING TRUMP” on its side. Instead of a traditional pilot’s helmet, however, the president is wearing a literal crown, just in case the rest of the visuals were too subtle. The plane succeeds in its mission: dumping inconceivable amounts of shit upon fictionalized No Kings protesters in New York’s Times Square.
This is just the latest AI slop Trump has posted. He’s also shared a racist depiction of House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries wearing a mustache and sombrero, a highly dystopian, bizarre “Trump Gaza” video, and more.
You have to wonder—how do these videos end up on Trump’s official account in the first place?
The president of the United States, I’ve learned, is at the very least capable of posting AI videos on main: According to a senior White House official, there are times when Trump will come across a video he finds particularly funny or amusing—either on Truth Social or through other unspecified channels—save it to his camera roll, and release it into the world. Most of the time, though, it’s staffers who identify a clip and gain approval for it to be posted on the president’s main account. Either way, Trump isn’t making the actual videos himself.
The White House remains cagey as to how the fighter jet video, specifically, ended up happening, and who, exactly, hit the button to post it.
As a general trend, it appears Trump is typing away on social media less than in his peak posting days, a former Trump campaign official tells me. He has long relied on dictation and annotated printouts, while still being prone to the more than occasional covfefe-esque typo.
Long before his descent into the AI slop trenches, Trump saw the value in having a team manage his Twitter presence. Trump would go on to strike fear into Republican politicians and business executives with his news-making and market-moving tweets throughout his first term in office, before getting suspended from the platform after inciting the January 6 insurrection. In the social media wilderness, he founded Truth Social in October 2021.
