On Truth Social, Trump has embraced AI media to attack foes and boost his image

Not long before midnight on Thursday, with the government shutdown underway, President Donald Trump posted a video to Truth Social of himself in the Oval Office appearing to throw one of his red hats onto someone’s head as the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” plays. Trump points and laughs.

The scene was fiction: It was a clearly manipulated video meant to play off a recent meeting between Trump and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Just a few days earlier, Trump had posted an altered video of Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer that included fake audio and showed Jeffries in a cartoon sombrero.

Democrats lambasted Trump. His allies laughed.

Love it or hate it, Trump’s embrace of synthetic media has proved effective at drawing attention at a time when meme-infused politics have exploded on social media, with many on the right and some on the left routinely launching barbs in the form of internet-friendly humor. AI videos have begun to enter that world, but few if any politicians are more prolific in posting them than Trump.

Trump’s sharing of generative AI media appears to be picking up speed. He has posted dozens of pieces of synthetic media including AI-generated images and deepfake videos on his Truth Social account since he returned to the White House in January, according to an NBC News review, with about half of those posts coming in the months of August and September. Many if not most of the posts appear to be taken from other people who first posted them on the internet.

“They go viral. They get attention. They’re this meme-ification of politics,” said Valerie Wirtschafter, a fellow at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution who studies the use of AI in politics. “They’re a little odd. But they get shared. They get eyeballs.”

The president has increasingly embraced fake images and videos — some appearing to be AI-generated — to mock and taunt political rivals while also puffing up his image. He’s also used manipulated and AI-generated media to dip into hot topics of national conversation, such as changes to the Cracker Barrel logo, and to drop hints about where he might take government policy on immigration or health care.

The AI content on Trump’s account falls on a spectrum from obviously fake mythmaking images, such as Trump standing next to a roaring lion, to content with a higher potential to mislead people, such as the fake video of Trump throwing a hat at Jeffries.

With the government shutdown expected to drag into next week, Trump posted four videos in four days that appeared to have been created or altered with technology, including one set to an alternate version of Blue Oyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper,” with Russ Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, as the Grim Reaper, an apparent reference to plans for the mass firing of government workers.

The posts have an enormous online audience. They go out to Trump’s 10.8 million followers on Truth Social. And many of the posts are later shared to Trump’s other social media accounts, including on X, where he has 109.5 million followers. Some of the AI posts get tens of millions of views, according to X’s data, creating an incentive to post more of them.

The use of generative AI by Trump and his staff has spiked alongside the tech’s broader rise on the internet. Millions of people are downloading AI engines such as Google Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, creating waves of synthetic content for social media. Trump has presented himself as an ally of the AI industry, inviting tech CEOs to the White House and releasing an “AI Action Plan” to encourage development. And AI-forward company stocks are booming, pushing the stock market to all-time highs this week.

And it comes as generative AI continues to develop rapidly, with this week’s release of OpenAI’s Sora 2 putting advanced video generation onto millions of smartphones.

The White House said it stands by Trump’s sharing of AI-generated content.

“President Trump is the most memetic communicator in presidential history, and his adroit use of social media has been key to driving his Make America Great Again movement to the forefront of American politics and society,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement to NBC News.

The Trump administration has fully embraced the technology as part of its second-term communications strategy. Federal agencies frequently post memes and AI images on social media to play to Trump’s base, such as a cartoon depiction in March that appeared to mock a crying migrant who had been arrested.

“He’s incredibly transparent, as you all know,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a briefing Wednesday.

“You hear from him directly on social media. He likes to share memes. He likes to share videos,” she said. “He likes to repost things that he sees other people post on social media, as well, and I think it’s quite refreshing that we have a president who is so open and honest, directly himself. Many a times, on Truth [Social], you are hearing directly from the president of the United States.”

Experts in AI said Trump is creating an alternate world for his followers.

Samuel Woolley, an associate professor of communication at the University of Pittsburgh, said that generative AI images and video can “bend reality” for people who consume them.

“They serve the goals of individuals and entities that are hoping to create a narrative that is alternative to scientific facts, or to create a brand-new version of what people should pay attention to and what is noteworthy,” he said.

While some of the images and videos, such as one in February about Trump ruling over Gaza, have drawn wide attention, others have received little notice in a frenetic information environment. Trump also posts plenty of unaltered images and videos alongside written messages, sometimes in his signature all-caps style.

In May, Trump shrugged off questions about an AI-generated image of him as pope. The image had appeared on his Truth Social account and on a White House X account, and Trump said he had nothing to do with it.

“They can’t take a joke?” Trump said at the time, referring to Catholics who said they were offended by the image. “Give me a break. It was just, somebody did it in fun. It’s fine. Have to have a little fun, don’t you?”

The White House has also dismissed the idea that internet jokes are somehow beneath the office, posting on X in July: “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say we can’t post banger memes.”

Of the dozens of generative AI posts examined by NBC News, about a third were videos and the rest were still images. Another dozen posts had images or video that appeared to use not artificial intelligence but older, cruder forms of digital manipulation, such as warping a photo of comedian Rosie O’Donnell to make her appear heavier.

As with the Trump-as-pope image, it’s not always clear who created the media and what software they used, although some of the images and videos include credits. Of the dozens of pieces of media, about two-thirds were ones posted directly to Trump’s account, while the rest were reposts of content from another account.

The tally does not include posts by other accounts such as the White House’s X account, which this year has posted AI-created portraits of Trump as a king, as Superman and as a character from “Star Wars.”

Some contain outright falsehoods. Last weekend, Trump posted a deepfake of himself and his daughter-in-law Lara Trump promoting a conspiracy theory about “medbeds,” a fake health cure-all popular in some online communities. The video was later removed.

Leavitt defended the video, saying, “I think the president saw the video and posted it and then took it down. And he has the right to do that. It’s his social media.”

Trump often employs AI to attack political rivals. A deepfake of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., shared by Trump on Sept. 8 uses a falsified voice to depict Pelosi admitting to a crime. A post on Sept. 3 presented Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, as sumo wrestlers. A post in July depicted Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., in handcuffs, while Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California is the subject of three posts.

Newsom, who also has recently embraced posting memes, struck back on Tuesday, with his press office posting an AI-generated video on X attacking Vance.

A Trump post on Truth Social from July 20 used AI to falsely show FBI agents arresting former President Barack Obama, sparking outcry. That video appeared near the height of a MAGA backlash over the Jeffrey Epstein files and drew condemnation from an Obama spokesperson, who called Trump’s claims that Obama rigged the 2016 and 2020 elections “bizarre” and “ridiculous.”

For Trump, the embrace of new media is an old skill, echoing his sway over New York tabloid newspapers in the 1980s through his use of Twitter, now X, when it was still new.

“He’s a master media manipulator, going way back,” said Michelle Amazeen, an associate professor of mass communication at Boston University who researches misinformation. “What he’s doing is dominating on social media, on television, in other news outlets, and it gives the illusion that this is the way things are now.”

Amazeen said AI-generated media may not be as popular as it appears. In a survey this year conducted by polling firm Ipsos for her research center at BU, 84% of respondents said such content should be clearly labeled and 81% said social media apps should be required to remove unauthorized deepfakes. (Trump’s AI posts are rarely labeled as such.)

“There’s a whole swath of people out there who are so turned off by this that they’ve tuned out,” she said.

Several of Trump’s AI posts relate to serious policy topics. On a Saturday in August, Trump posted a fictitious image of himself at the New York Stock Exchange’s famous bell next to a sign for something called the Great American Mortgage Corporation. That company does not appear to exist, but the post appeared to reference a proposal to sell the government’s stakes in mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under a new entity with the ticker symbol MAGA. A sale hasn’t happened but remains a topic of discussion.

On a Saturday in September, Trump posted a cartoon image depicting him firing Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, also prompting news coverage.

Sometimes Trump’s intent just isn’t clear, said Daniel Schiff, an assistant professor of technology policy at Purdue University.

“Is this something that’s going to happen? Or something that they just might want to happen?” he said. “It can be a gray area.”

AI-created animals sometimes pop up on Trump’s feed, including at least three lions and one dove. And at least four AI-created posts include a reference to the long-running QAnon conspiracy theory.

Trump, though, is the main character on his Truth Social feed. When generative AI or other synthetic media appears on his feed, it has often included a fictitious depiction of Trump in some form, including: Trump as a pole vaulter, Trump as SWAT team member, Trump as a train conductor, Trump as an orchestra conductor, Trump as a character from the film “Apocalypse Now” and Trump as a member of the rock band Journey.

Schiff, who helps to run a database of political deepfakes and who is not related to the California senator, said it’s notable to see generative AI used to create so much “positive” content, after years of focus by researchers and journalists alike on deepfake scams or deepfake political attacks. He also said that Trump is the most widely popular subject for AI fakes across the internet, among fans and critics.

“The plurality of deepfakes are about Trump,” he said, excluding sexual deepfakes.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com