President Trump has long been a master of using social media for attention. And A.I. has supercharged his ability to do so.
On a recent weekend, Trump went on a tear posting a series of A.I.-generated images: Trump intimidating the prime minister of Canada with a hockey stick; Trump on horseback next to George Washington; an image of the moon with an American flag over it. (Caption: “The Moon Is Ours.”) It’s a glimpse into the world as Trump would like it to be. It’s also, for many, deeply unsettling.
Today, Peter Baker, our chief White House correspondent, writes about what Trump’s increasingly out-there posts say about the president’s state of mind — and the changing nature of the presidency.
Just before noon on a holiday weekend earlier this month, while many Americans were at the beach, Trump’s social media account roared to life. In what has increasingly become his weekend habit, he unleashed a daylong barrage of posts that put the bully in bully pulpit.
There were images of Trump intimidating Canada’s prime minister with a hockey stick. Trump personally bombing enemy targets. Trump patrolling dark streets with killer robots. There were maps showing the United States taking over other countries. There were tributes to himself as “the Greatest President of All Time!”
The 60 messages posted online over 10 hours and 41 minutes offered a window into Trump’s own unique reality. For years, his social media feed was said to be a mirror of his id. But with A.I., it’s become the manifestation of how he wants to be seen in a more visual, visceral way — as a warrior, a conqueror, a historical figure (and a younger, thinner, more muscular version of himself).
It’s a measure of how much Trump has changed the nature of the presidency that all this has, to some extent, become routine.
Flooding the zone
To his defenders, Trump is a master of baiting his adversaries and getting them to react. “It’s called: We do a little trolling,” as he once put it. The more out there the message is, the more his supporters cheer. As abnormal as the images that he posts are for a president, Trump’s allies argue that they convey a raw quality that suits an age of no-holds-barred politics.
“The media and President Trump’s other critics have spent more than a decade complaining about his use of social media,” said Alex Bruesewitz, a former campaign aide. “They keep calling it ‘unpresidential,’ but if the president is doing it, it’s presidential by definition. I think most Americans appreciate the authentic and transparent way he uses these platforms.”
To Trump’s critics, who never considered him a model of stability in the first place, these frenetic bursts of fantasy and vanity are proof that the 80-year-old president is deteriorating further with age. But they’re also so frequent that their capacity to shock has diminished.
