Washington – Here it is, represented at six months of its mandate, chiseled and fornid, as powerful as the nation itself. Here is like a Jedi of Star Wars wielding a patriot red light saber, rescuing our galaxy from the forces of evil. Here he is taking control of Gaza, transforming the strip into a full luxury tourist center with a golden effigy of himself.
You can be anything, maybe they told you when growing. Doctor. Astronaut. Maybe, one day, the president. But even the United States executive, the leader of the free world, introduces himself as something more epic, like someone who is not quite himself.
In the social media accounts of Donald Trump and his second mandate administration, a new official image of the President is emerging gradually: an artificially generated.
A sign of the times, certainly, when the attraction of reinventing itself with artificial intelligence has come since us, common citizens. Boring your selfies? Join a viral trend: there is an image generator or a chatbot that can become a Renaissance style paint, a character from Studio Ghibli or an action figure with illustrations and accessories.
Artificial images are not new to Trump, an early objective of drills generated by AI that then exploded the technology during his campaign for the 2024 presidency. “It works in both directions,” said the Republican President about the content generated by AI at a press conference earlier this month. “If something really bad happens, you may have to blame the AI.”
Trump’s images published by him and his team opt for the alternative: not misleading, but evident in his fictional character. Pope Francis dies and Trump jokes with journalists saying he would like to be a potato. A week later, it is, but in an image generated by AI that publishes, republished by the White House. Trump compares with a king in a social truth publication in February, and the AI makes him one an X post of the White House less than an hour later.
The artifice reaches the usual style of Trump: striking, shameless, striking, and coincides with the large number of meme publications of the social media team, which has promised to continue. Official social media accounts of the Administration have grown in more than 16 million new followers on all platforms from the day of the inauguration, said a White House official to NBC News.
The White House recognizes the appeal. In July, he published in his X account: “nowhere in the Constitution says that we cannot publish explosive memes.” Attached to the publication, a photo of a sign in the White House garden parodying the detractors: ‘OMG, Did The White House Really Post This?’
Behind the desire of the commander in chief of creating a self, not unusual, an official communication channel infantry is available. And we, people, cannot avoid tune in.
Feelings do not care about your facts
As so many things on the Internet these days, Trump’s portraits are prepared for people to react, says Evan Coreg, political historian and author of “Power and history: how the presidential narrative elaborated has determined political success from George Washington to George W. Bush.”
“By when you have seen it, you have understood it. And that is, of course, efficacy,” said Cornog. “It does not require any effort, or for the person who generates it, but particularly for the person who consumes it.”
The expressive power of political images, regardless of the truth of his message, has been understood for a long time by politicians and their detractors.
The symbols of the Troncos cabin and the hard cider of the campaign of President William Henry Harrison, who represented him as a “people of the people”, helped him win the elections of 1840. Thirty years later, the political cartoonist Thomas Nast would return the public opinion against William Marcy “Boss” Tweed with his scathing portraits of the politic overweight for greed. “Let’s stop those damn photos!” Tweed said once, or so says the story.
The decades have since witnessed the birth of photography, cinema, television, internet, computer printers, image editing software and digital screens that shrunk until they could fit in our pockets, which made it easier to create and spread, and manipulate, images.
On the contrary, current generative technology offers greater realism, functionality and accessibility to content creation that never, says IA Henry Ajder expert. Not to mention, of course, a capacity for infinite automated possibilities.
The previous presidents “had to have fought in a war to run as a war hero,” says Cornog. Now, they can simply generate an image of themselves as such. On horseback, or not, on a battlefield. With an American flag waving behind him and an eagle flying.
Trump’s images shared by him and his administration pursue an equally heroic vision of the president. The power, yours and that of the country, is a constant issue, added Cornog.
In fact, generative AI allows an exhibition of interior worlds perhaps uncomfortably intimately as people use such technology to illustrate and communicate their “fantasy lives” or caricaturescas versions of themselves, says Mitchell Stephens, author of “the rise of the image, the fall of the word.”
But an inverse desire can fulfill the same ease: to represent or reinforce a subjective concept of reality.
“Many people are sharing content generated by AI, which is clearly false, but that is almost seen as a kind of revealing representation of someone,” Ajder said. This content feeds a mentality that mutters: “We all know they are really like that.”
“And so, even if people know it is false,” Ajder said, “they still see it as a kind of reflection and satisfaction of a kind of truth, his truth about how the world is.”
The commentators take over
The lack of subtlety in Trump’s images of himself helps explain his constant virality.
Commentators can be found regretting the disappearance of the presidential decorum (“I never thought I would see the day the White House is just a joke. This is so shameful”) or enjoying those same reactions (“seeing left explode for this has been a pleasure”).
Other answers, even from the president’s base, still are not convinced (as an X user complained about the publication of Trump’s White House as Pope: “I voted for you, but this is weird and creepy. More massive deportations and less than this is”).
But that is Trump’s tradition, who is not difficult to collect the currency of our economy of attention: whether you will sketch a smile or cling to your pearls, he still made you look.
“In his first administration, Twitter used in a way that no president had used,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition project, an organization that facilitates the transition between presidents. “What they do in this administration is to take it further, since there has been an increase in what can be done online.” Or, as a Reddit user referred to the president: “Troll in Chief.”
Do you really think Trump should be Pope? Do you really believe the White House that is a king? Accuracy is not the point, not for a man who frequently arbitrates what he tells how truth. The use of AI by Trump attaches to a family recipe for bait: raw comedy dotted with illusions.
“It’s fine,” Trump said in May, when asked if the publication generated by him as Pope decreased the substance of the official White House account.
“You have to have fun a little, right?”