By Eric Lutz

Copyright vanityfair

The fake Schumer-Jeffries video wasn’t the only wild AI content pushed by Trump in the past week. On Saturday, the president posted another fake video, this one promoting the “medbed” conspiracy theory that there are cure-all beds being kept from the public by the government, an oldie that has found new life among some in the QAnon set. “This is the beginning of a new era in American health care,” Trump said in the fake video, meant to look like a Fox News segment hosted by his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.
He has since deleted that video. But take a spin through the president’s Truth Social page, and among the various threats to tariff foreign-made movies or attack American cities, you’ll find a library of AI-generated memes and videos, the most outrageous of which have generated their own news cycles. The one implying he would declare war on Chicago. The one depicting Barack Obama being handcuffed in the Oval Office and then stewing in a jail cell. And who can forget the February fever dream in which war-torn Gaza became a gaudy Trump resort where Elon Musk could enjoy hummus and the president could lounge by the pool with Benjamin Netanyahu?
If Trump’s dominant online output in his first term was rage posts, then in his second, it is slop: ugly nonsense meant to simultaneously provoke, menace, distract, and say nothing at all. Such posts mark an acceleration of Steve Bannon’s nihilistic “flood the zone with shit” strategy, deployed—literally—without humanity. And though, in Trump’s first term, there was at least some delineation between his online and real-world projects, there is no similar line in his second. The scenes playing out on the streets of this country—a gang of mostly masked ICE agents fruitlessly chasing a bicyclist in downtown Chicago, say—seem like the kinds of things an LLM might hallucinate. Musk, a former top Trump adviser, even declared onstage in February: “I am become meme…. I’m just living the meme.” Aren’t we all these days?
Schumer and Jeffries both condemned Trump’s fake video. “If you think your shutdown is a joke, it just proves what we all know: You can’t negotiate,” Schumer wrote in response to the video Monday night. “You can only throw tantrums.” But Republicans made clear that they have no issue with such outbursts: “I think sometimes the president plays with the press like a little boy and a flashlight and a dog,” GOP senator Roger Marshall said on CNN Monday. “And he’s shining the flashlight here, and he’s shining it there.”