commentary
This longtime con man was doing deepfakes long before that was a thing. He's a bot in human form
Contributing Writer
Published
Donald Trump uses a cellphone aboard Marine One at Leesburg Executive Airport. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
Has anyone fallen deeper in love with artificial intelligence than Donald Trump?
The man who threatened to sue the places he attended school to stop them from releasing his grades and who, while playacting as president, regularly badmouths his own country’s intelligence agencies, loves the fakery made possible by AI.
That makes perfect sense. AI is like a fantasy mirror, before which our artificial president cannot stop admiringly preening.
Just as AI is useful for lazy students who don’t want to write that term paper, it’s an unnatural boon for a narcissistic con man. Trump relishes utilizing AI to disparage his political opponents and — most deliciously for him and most gag-inducingly for normal people — to create heroic images of himself, like some latter-day demented Roman emperor.
Someone as lazy and uncreative as Trump is drawn to AI to robotically whip up ludicrous images of himself as Superman or some other musclebound superhero. His AI-generated video showing himself as “King Trump” piloting a fighter jet and dumping a load of feces on No Kings protesters protest was typically puerile and grotesque.
His depictions of himself as the pope or, more recently, as Jesus managed to hit the trifecta: They were adolescent, ludicrous and deeply offensive.
Those are only a few examples of the increasing number of AI-generated deepfake images that the childish mind occupying the Mar-a-Lago North (otherwise known as the White House) has posted so far in his second term.
Come to think of it, by indefatigably puffing himself up as a genius businessman who belonged on the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans — often through the persona of “Trump spokesman” John Barron — or by putting his own face on a faux Time magazine cover, Donald Trump was a deepfake decades before the advent of AI.
By puffing himself up as a genius businessman who belonged on the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans — often through the persona of “Trump spokesman” John Barron — Donald Trump was a deepfake decades before the advent of AI.
He’s been faking it long before he began “acing” basic tests to judge his cognitive fitness, long before he began to spout off about nuclear war and make wildly inappropriate comments in front of children gathered around him for White House photo ops.
Speaking of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which Trump apparently thinks is tantamount to an SAT exam or IQ test, he boasted recently that he’d supposedly been able to do an absurd number of quick mental mathematical calculations.
That was especially funny because he mentioned it right after giving a quite different example, in which he was asked identify a bear among four animal shapes. Jon Stewart did a nice job of assessing the likelihood that Trump could do the math. (I quickly did my own mental calculations and concluded there was at least a 600% chance that Trump was making it up.)
Vulgar, venal creatures like him are not capable of creating anything of beauty or artistic value; they can only destroy. The man who illegally had the East Wing of the White House demolished and is compulsively building monuments to himself is alternately lying about and ignoring his illegal war with Iran while pushing forward with his long-dreamed-of ballroom.
He originally claimed that private donations from his billionaire tech-bros would pay for it, but then he changed his mind and wants taxpayers to foot the absurd bill. That may have been a ballroom too far, even for Republicans in the Senate, which is something of a breakthrough. I’m old enough to remember when Mexico was going to pay for Trump’s border wall!
Trump originally claimed that private donations from his billionaire tech-bros would pay for it, but then he changed his mind and wants taxpayers to foot the absurd bill. I’m old enough to remember when Mexico was going to pay for Trump’s border wall.
As prices rise across the board for American consumers, thanks to Trump’s war and his willy-nilly tariffs, he’s turning his scattershot focus to other vanity projects, including a massive, incongruous triumphal arch at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery, painting the iconic Eisenhower Executive Office Building white, and taking over three of Washington’s beloved public golf courses.
His vanity projects often face major delays due to protests and lawsuits, since he can’t or won’t do anything by the book, but he can always temporarily relieve his bottomless urge to self-aggrandize with another jolt of AI deepfake imagery. King Trump, Pope Trump, Trump Christ — it’s as easy as ringing for another Diet Coke.
It’s more than a little disconcerting that a manchild so in league with the tech overlords, and so in love with using AI to prop up his fragile self-image, should have any role whatever in regulating the industry. As we know, for Donald, loyalty trumps lawfulness every time.
As author and activist Cory Doctorow writes, it makes sense to worry about AI — its false promises, he says, mean society will keep losing or abandoning actual expertise. As Doctorow also notes, plenty of damage is being done with the current systems the tech lords have designed to “ens**ttify” our lives.
With Trump, one can never comfortably speak of the “latest” outrage or embarrassment because the next one will have happened already, probably in a 4 a.m. Truth Social tirade, but here are just a few: putting his own face on coins and passports, erecting a 15-foot golden statue of himself (dubbed “Don Colossus”) at his Doral golf course, and, as reported in The Atlantic, comparing himself to the greatest figures in world history — Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte. (Humorist Andy Borowitz convincingly notes that Trump is far more similar to the largely forgotten Napoleon III.)
Want more sharp takes on politics? , Standing Room Only by Amanda Marcotte, also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
Trump has incessantly compared himself to the two greatest U.S. presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and has even tried, with AI’s aid, to bully his way onto Mount Rushmore. I hardly need to tell you that those comparisons are ludicrous. After his first term, Trump was judged by historians as either the worst president or close to the worst, and it’s impossible to see how, with his corrupt and massively destructive second term, that ranking could have improved.
Trump must constantly seethe at the knowledge that many of those same historians rank former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden among the better presidents of our recent history, given how he won’t shut up about them.
With his weak-kneed authoritarian longing to be viewed as the greatest example of everything, perhaps Trump can take solace in the knowledge that he’ll be remembered by history as the man who ignored his oath of office and enriched himself in manifestly corrupt fashion — more so, in all probability, than the next 10 most corrupt presidents combined.
Trump may not understand this part or believe it, but the rest of the world has moved on from its former romance with America, largely due to Trump’s deranged, retrograde, tyrant-worshipping foreign policy. That history is already being written, and we still must survive two more years of Deepfake Don’s assault on reality, decency, the rule of law and ordinary people around the world.