Deepfake Don
No one is more in need of artificial intelligence than the Conman in Chief.
Has anyone fallen deeper in love with artificial intelligence than Donald Trump?
The man who threatened to sue the places he attended school to keep them from releasing his grades, who, playacting as president, regularly badmouths his own country’s intelligence agency, loves the fakery made possible by AI.
And that makes perfect sense. It’s a fantasy mirror into which the artificial president cannot stop admiringly preening.
Just as it is useful for lazy students who don’t want to write that term paper, AI is an unnatural boon for a narcissistic conman. Trump relishes utilizing AI to disparage his political opponents and — most deliciously for him and most gag-inducing for normal people — to create heroic images of himself, like some latter-day demented Roman emperor.
Someone as lazy and uncreative as Trump is naturally drawn to utilize AI to automatically whip up ludicrous images of himself as Superman or some other muscle-y superhero. His AI-generated video showing himself as “King Trump” piloting a fighter jet and dropping feces on citizens exercising their First Amendment right to protest was typically puerile and grotesque.
His depictions of himself as the Pope or, more recently, as Jesus managed to hit a trifecta of being adolescent, ludicrous, and deeply offensive.
But those are only a few examples of the increasing number of AI-generated deepfake images that the childish mind occupying the Oval Office (a k a, Mar-a-Lago North) has posted so far in his second term.
Donald was a deepfake decades before the advent of AI.
Come to think of it, by indefatigably puffing himself up as a great businessman and someone who deserved to be on the Forbes list of the most wealthy Americans — often in the guise of a “Trump spokesperson” like John Barron — or putting his own face on a faux Time magazine cover, Donald was a deepfake decades before the advent of AI.
Yes, Trump has always been deepfaking the public, long before he began “acing” basic tests to judge his cognitive fitness, long before he began to make a habit of spouting off about nuclear war and making other wildly inappropriate comments in front of young children gathered around him for photo ops at the White House.
Speaking of the cognitive test, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which Trump apparently considers tantamount to an SAT exam or IQ test, he boasted last week about being able to do an absurd number of quick mental mathematical calculations.
It was hilarious because he mentioned it right after giving an example in which he was asked to simply identify the bear from the shapes of four animals. Jon Stewart did a particularly good job in assessing the likelihood that Trump could do the math. (I quickly did some of my own mental calculations and figured there was at least a 600% chance that Trump was making it up.)
Vulgar, venal creatures like Trump cannot create anything of beauty or of artistic value; they can only destroy. Always restlessly building monuments to himself, the man who illegally had the East Wing of the White House demolished is alternately lying about and ignoring his illegal war of choice with Iran while pushing forward with the illegal construction of his long-dreamed-of ballroom.
He said private donations from his billionaire tech bros would pay for it, but now he wants you to foot the absurd bill. Remember when Mexico was going to pay for Trump’s wall?
And as prices rise across the board for U.S. consumers due to his war and his willy-nilly tariffs, The Donald is turning his scatter-shot focus on many other vanity projects, including a massive, incongruous triumphal arch at the entrance of the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery, painting the iconic Second Empire-style Eisenhower Executive Office Building white, and taking over three beloved Washington, DC, public golf courses.
Trump’s bottomless urge to self-aggrandize can be temporarily relieved by another jolt of AI deepfake imagery.
His vanity projects often face major delays due to protests and lawsuits, because he refuses to do anything by the book, but his bottomless urge to self-aggrandize can be temporarily relieved by another jolt of AI deepfake imagery. Trump the King, Trump the Pope, Trump the Christ — it’s as easy as ringing for another Diet Coke.
It should go without saying that it is more than a little disconcerting that a man-child so in league with the tech overlords, and so in love with using AI to prop up his ever-fragile self-image, is in any position to have any role in its regulation. Plus, for Donald, loyalty trumps lawfulness every time.
As author and activist Cory Doctorow writes, it certainly makes sense to worry about AI — for example, more expertise will be lost to society as a result of the false promises of AI. But, he notes, there’s plenty of damage being done with the current systems the tech lords have designed to, as Doctorow puts it, enshittify our lives.
With Trump, one can never comfortably write of “the latest” outrage or embarrassment because the next will likely have already happened, in, say, a 4 am post to Truth Social, but here are just a few of late: having his face added to coins and passports, creating 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 actually very much like the largely forgotten Napoleon III.)
Trump has incessantly compared himself to the greatest U.S. presidents, Washington and Lincoln, trying, with the aid of AI, to bully his way onto Mount Rushmore, but those comparisons are obviously ludicrous. After his first term, Trump was judged by historians as the worst, or among the very worst, of presidents, and it’s impossible to see how, with his shit-show, selling-out-America second term, that ranking could ever change.
Trump must seethe knowing that most of those same historians rank former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden among the better presidents in our history. He cannot stop talking about them.
With his trembling authoritarian need to be viewed as the greatest example of everything, perhaps Trump can take some solace in the fact that he will be remembered by history as the man who corrupted the U.S. presidency and ignored his oath of office far more than any other president — more than the ten next-worst presidents combined.
That fact may not be noted in U.S. history, but the rest of the world has moved on from us already, due to Trump’s absolutely deranged, Vladimir Putin–forward foreign policy. That history is already being written.
Meanwhile, to every reasonable American’s deep shame, Deepfake Don continues his assault on reality, decency, the rule of law, the poor, and working people around the globe.
A version of this essay later appeared in Salon.
