President Donald Trump, a septuagenarian known for his general avoidance of keyboards and computers, has become something of a leading U.S. president on generative AI.
The most infamous example of his experiments with AI-generated videos occurred before the No Kings protests earlier this month. In the clip, the president is fully decked out Top Gun equipment, piloting a fighter plane with “KING TRUMP” on its side. However, instead of a traditional pilot’s helmet, the president wears a literal crown, just in case the rest of the visuals are too subtle. The plane succeeds in its mission: dumping inconceivable amounts of shit on fictional No Kings protesters in New York’s Times Square.
This is just the latest AI nonsense Trump has released. He also shared a racist depiction of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wearing a mustache and sombrero, a very dystopian and bizarre “Trump Gaza” video, and much more.
One has to ask: how do these videos end up on Trump’s official account in the first place?
The President of the United States, I learned, is at least capable of posting AI videos on hand: According to a senior White House official, sometimes Trump comes across a video he finds particularly funny or amusing—either on Truth Social or through other unspecified channels—and saves it to his camera roll and releases it to the world. Most of the time, though, it’s staffers who identify a clip and get approval for it to be posted to the president’s main account. Regardless, Trump does not make the videos himself.
The White House remains suspicious of how the fighter jet video, in particular, ended up happening, and who, exactly, pushed the button to release it.
As a general trend, it appears that Trump is tapping less on social media than on his peak days, a former Trump campaign official told me. It has long relied on dictations and annotated prints, while being subject to more than occasional typographical errors.
Long before his descent into the AI trenches, Trump understood the value of entrusting a team to manage his presence on Twitter. Trump continued to sow fear among Republican politicians and business leaders with his news and market-moving tweets throughout his first term, before being suspended from the platform after inciting the January 6 insurrection. In the social media wilderness, he founded Truth Social in October 2021.
