Trump has found an aesthetic to define his second term: grotesque AI slop.
Over the weekend, the Trump administration posted at least seven different pieces of AI generated or AI altered media, ranging from Trump imagining himself as a pope and a Star Wars Jedi (or Sith?) to Obama-esque “Hope” posters featuring people the administration has deported.
This has become the Slop Presidency, and AI-generated images are the perfect artistic medium for the Trump presidency. They're impulsively created, grotesque, and low-effort. Trumpworld’s fascination with slop is the logical next step for a President that, in his first term, regularly retweeted random memes created by his army of supporters on Discord or The Donald, a subreddit that ultimately became a Reddit-clone website after it was banned. AI allows his team to create media that would never exist otherwise, a particularly useful tool for a President and administration that has a hostile relationship with reality.
Trump’s original fascination with AI slop began last summer, after he said legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were “eating the cats…they’re eating the pets” in his debate with Kamala Harris. The internet’s AI slop factories began spinning up images of Trump as cat-and-dog savior. Since then, Trump and the administration have occasionally shared or reposted AI slop. In his first week in office, Trump shared an AI-generated “GM” car image that was promoting $TRUMP coin. “What a beautiful car. Congrats to GM!,” he posted.