overview

This project investigates how artificial intelligence is being used in contemporary political communication, with a focus on the current Donald Trump political movement. Specifically, it examines the rise of AI slop and how it functions as a tool of public manipulation.

Through key case studies, including AI-generated media portraying Trump in symbolic or misleading roles, I explore how this content contributes to the construction of a mythologized political persona. These examples are not just online oddities, but reflect a broader strategy of narrative control, emotional manipulation, and epistemic instability.

By drawing parallels to propaganda techniques used by authoritarian regimes like Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, this project aims to highlight the dangers of AI being deployed in the service of authoritarian political aims. At stake is not just the integrity of information, but the conditions under which public understanding, trust, and democratic participation can survive.

This work combines critical media analysis with philosophical inquiry, particularly around truth, perception, and the ethics of representation in the digital age. The goal is not just to critique Trump’s use of AI, but to provide a framework for recognizing how emerging technologies are reshaping political reality and to ask what, if anything, can be done to resist it.

what is ai slop?

AI slop refers to mass-produced, low-quality, and often misleading content generated by artificial intelligence: text, images, videos, or audio that are created quickly, with minimal oversight, and circulated widely across digital platforms. While not all AI-generated content falls under this label, slop typically shares three characteristics: it’s visually or emotionally striking, it lacks factual grounding or clear authorship, and it is optimized for viral spread rather than accuracy or substance.

AI slop thrives in environments where speed, volume, and engagement matter more than clarity or precision. It’s often generated with little human intervention, using models trained on vast (and frequently unvetted) datasets. The result is content that can feel plausible, even authoritative, while remaining untethered from reality.

What makes slop distinctive isn’t just its inaccuracy—it’s the way it mimics coherence. It looks like information, behaves like communication, and circulates like media. But its purpose is not to inform—it’s to fill space. In this way, AI slop reflects deeper shifts in how we produce, encounter, and assign meaning to digital content. It’s a symptom of an online ecosystem optimized for scale, where quality control is secondary to output.

Understanding AI slop means recognizing not just technological shortcomings, but a broader cultural dynamic: one in which volume overwhelms verification, and where the line between signal and noise continues to erode.

Interestingly, ChatGPT’s image generator will not create an image prompted as “AI Slop” as it “goes against its image guidelines”.

trump's use of ai

Donald Trump’s embrace of generative AI marks a pivotal evolution in his approach to political communication, combining his signature spectacle-driven style with new tools that allow for mass production of symbolic content. As reported by 404 Media, Trump’s campaign and presidency have embraced “AI slop”—cheap, algorithmically-optimized, and visually jarring imagery—as a way to dominate attention and hijack engagement systems. These images are rarely subtle or persuasive; instead, they function as “overwhelming bursts of digital noise”, designed to short-circuit traditional media filters. Trump’s strategy mirrors earlier meme-based tactics used in 2016, but AI allows him to scale this approach rapidly, making visual mythology an always-on output of his political machine.

As Katy Waldman observes in *The New Yorker*, Trump’s taste has always skewed toward visual maximalism and symbolic literalism—think golden toilets, glitzy hotels, and giant self-portraits. AI-generated imagery suits this sensibility perfectly. These outputs present Trump as bodybuilder, savior, king—whatever symbolic identity he wants projected into the public sphere. The appeal lies not in nuance but in the **unambiguous clarity of each message**: Trump is powerful, revered, and victorious. This is not just image-making; it is a reflection of a deep desire to construct a reality free of interference or opposition—one that centers Trump as the **sole protagonist** in a machine-rendered world of infinite affirmation.

Trump’s relationship to AI isn’t confined to campaign visuals; it increasingly informs a broader political ethos, one that prioritizes performance over substance. Waldman extends her critique into bureaucratic culture, highlighting Elon Musk’s directive for federal workers to submit weekly self-reports—a move that produces **functionless bureaucratic slop** echoing the hollow spectacle of Trump’s visual propaganda. AI, in this frame, becomes a metaphor for Trump’s ideal administration: a government of faceless outputs, hollow rituals, and symbolic dominance. Whether in image, messaging, or labor, Trump’s use of AI reflects a deeper shift—**from democratic deliberation to authoritarian display**, from human process to automated repetition.

case study: portraits, endorsements

One of the most emblematic moments of Trump’s AI-driven aesthetic came in early 2025, when his campaign unleashed a series of AI-generated images over a single weekend, as documented by 404 Media. These included bizarre depictions of Trump as the Pope, a Sith Lord, and a pop-art icon, all characterized by a grotesque, uncanny quality that intentionally rejected polish or realism. Matthew Gault describes this as a brute-force digital strategy, flooding social platforms with chaotic visual noise designed to overwhelm algorithmic curation and public discourse alike. These images were less about conveying coherent messages and more about ensuring constant visual presence—an endless stream of “slop” that embeds Trump’s mythos by sheer volume and memorability.

In another high-profile case, The Atlantic highlighted Trump’s use of AI-generated images to fabricate political endorsements and stir outrage. A notable example was an AI-created image depicting Taylor Swift and her fans wearing “Swifties for Trump” shirts, alongside a caption implying her support for his presidency. Trump’s own social media reposted this with the phrase “I accept!” This image, obviously fabricated, did not aim to deceive in a strict sense but served as a provocative visual meme designed to energize his base and bait mainstream media into covering the controversy. Charlie Warzel notes that such “authentically fake” images function by flattening political discourse into emotional spectacle, reinforcing narratives without relying on factual accuracy.

case study: trump gaza, TIME

Katy Waldman’s New Yorker piece draws attention to a particularly striking example of Trump’s AI usage: a video created via Arcana Labs that reimagines Gaza not as a conflict zone but as a glowing, gilded landscape dotted with effigies of Trump himself. The video erases the human presence in favor of an artifice centered entirely on Trump’s image. Waldman interprets this as a visual manifestation of Trump’s fantasy for a reality untroubled by other humans—one cleansed of complexity, dissent, or suffering, replaced instead by a golden, machine-crafted utopia. This example underscores how AI allows Trump to produce not just propaganda but entire symbolic universes that reflect and reinforce his narcissistic worldview.

Finally, Waldman uses the metaphor of Trump’s 2017 inauguration cake—an elaborate but mostly Styrofoam structure—to illustrate how his AI use extends into governance itself. The cake, grand in appearance but hollow inside, was cut ceremonially with a military sword, symbolizing a governing style that values optics over substance. This aesthetic is echoed in Elon Musk’s mandate that federal employees submit repetitive, meaningless weekly reports, which Waldman describes as bureaucratic slop mirroring Trump’s superficial, performative style. Together, these examples reveal how Trump’s use of AI-generated content is part of a wider political ethos: one that prioritizes spectacle and symbolic control across both media and state apparatus, eroding meaningful accountability and human agency.

historical connections

Throughout history, authoritarian regimes have understood that controlling art and media is not merely about managing information—it is a fundamental strategy to shape collective consciousness and sustain political power. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, this principle was institutionalized through the doctrine of Socialist Realism, which emerged in the 1930s as the officially sanctioned artistic style. This doctrine mandated that all creative works—whether paintings, literature, theater, or film—must depict the Soviet people as heroic builders of a communist utopia and glorify Stalin himself as the infallible leader guiding the nation. The Soviet state tightly controlled cultural production by censoring any form of artistic experimentation or criticism that did not conform to this idealized vision. Writers, artists, and filmmakers who deviated from Socialist Realism risked persecution, imprisonment, or exile. As a result, Soviet art became a tool of propaganda, producing a highly curated reality that suppressed dissenting voices and restricted the public’s access to alternative narratives. This monopoly over culture was critical in reinforcing the regime’s authoritarian grip, not only by promoting ideological conformity but also by shaping the very identity of Soviet citizens around a state-approved mythos.

In a parallel but distinct context, Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler weaponized art and media to advance its totalitarian and genocidal agenda. The Nazi regime launched an aggressive campaign against so-called “degenerate art”—works that included modernist, abstract, Jewish, and avant-garde influences—which were publicly denounced and often destroyed. Instead, the Nazis promoted an aesthetic rooted in classical realism that idealized Aryan racial purity, strength, and nationalism. The cultural output glorified militarism, obedience, and Hitler’s cult of personality. Central to this effort was Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda, which orchestrated a comprehensive media strategy spanning radio broadcasts, feature films, newspapers, and large-scale exhibitions. This media machinery did not merely inform; it shaped perceptions and emotions, creating an all-encompassing narrative that normalized racism, justified expansionism, and dehumanized targeted groups. By tightly controlling artistic expression and saturating public discourse with state-sponsored symbolism, the Nazis engineered a cultural environment that enabled widespread complicity in their brutal policies. Their manipulation of art and media demonstrates how authoritarian regimes exploit aesthetics not just for persuasion, but to fundamentally reorder societal values and erase dissent.

In the present day, regimes such as North Korea and the former Gaddafi government in Libya continue to harness art and media as instruments of state power, tightly regulating cultural production to project loyalty and suppress dissent. North Korean artistic output is meticulously curated to glorify the Kim dynasty and promote the Juche ideology, while independent expression is harshly punished. Under Gaddafi, Libya’s media landscape was similarly controlled to reinforce the leader’s cult and revolutionary narrative. These examples illustrate how the monopolization of narrative and symbolic representation remains a core feature of authoritarian governance. Against this historical backdrop, Trump’s use of AI-generated imagery—flooding digital platforms with synthetic, emotionally charged content designed to overwhelm discourse—can be seen as a contemporary iteration of this longstanding tactic: controlling perception not only through traditional media, but now by weaponizing emerging technologies to construct and dominate political reality.

white house imagery vs ai

In the contemporary media landscape, Trump’s relentless deployment of AI-generated imagery creates a visual overload that blurs the line between the real and the synthetic. As reported by The New York Times, a viral moment occurred when Trump posed in a McDonald’s kitchen prepping fries—a staged “photo‑op” connoting populist authenticity, yet one so clearly managed that skeptics dubbed it a stunt. Meanwhile, The New Yorker describes how Trump’s social media team circulates genuine deportation videos—showing deportees being shackled or having their heads shaved—and then overlays or shares images (e.g., a tattooed hand allegedly belonging to a gang member) that were digitally altered to reinforce dehumanizing narratives. Together, these tactics reveal how AI slop dilutes the authority of real visuals: when fabricated content is so ubiquitous—that Trump appears riding lions, washed in glowing halos, or crowned like a king—even actual imagery begins to feel staged, manipulated, or less emotionally potent. Authentic footage loses its power to ground the viewer; reality itself starts to appear as uncertain as the AI-generated spectacle. In such a landscape, impactful truth becomes less resonant than flashy fantasy.

In contrast, official visuals from Trump’s White House—such as those captured in the Situation Room—often feel cluttered, uninspired, and lacking narrative clarity or emotional weight. Getty Images collections and White House handouts document crowded snapshots of advisors sitting around a table under dull lighting, with no focal point or dramatic framing—this is bureaucratic theater without tension or gravitas. Even sophisticated operations centers like the post-renovation Situation Room — intended to convey technological sophistication—come across as sterile and unmemorable; the visuals lack the human focus or compositional drama found in historic moments such as the iconic Obama bin Laden raid photograph, instead appearing dull and formulaic. As a result, these genuine images fail to compete with Trump’s AI slop in the visual arena. Where real imagery should anchor legitimacy and convey substance, it instead registers as flat and forgettable. Trump compensates by flooding social media with synthetic art that is loud, emotionally charged, and algorithmically weighted—effectively drowning out the real images of governance and deflecting attention from actual policy and human consequences.

conclusion and final remarks

Trump’s deployment of AI slop is not just a quirky flourish of campaign branding—it represents a deliberate recalibration of how political reality is produced, perceived, and contested. By overwhelming the digital environment with synthetic, emotionally loaded imagery, Trump sidesteps the constraints of factual accountability while actively eroding the authority of authentic documentation. In doing so, he blurs the epistemic boundary between what is real and what is fabricated, creating a media ecosystem where spectacle becomes the primary currency of political legitimacy. The historical parallels to state-controlled art and propaganda are not incidental; they reveal a throughline connecting twentieth-century authoritarian strategies to the algorithmically driven propaganda of today. What has changed is the scale, speed, and accessibility of the tools, which now allow a single political figure to generate, disseminate, and iterate propaganda at a pace unmatched by traditional media.

The implications extend beyond Trump’s personal brand or even the current electoral cycle. AI slop, once normalized as a legitimate mode of political expression, sets a precedent for how future leaders—authoritarian or otherwise—can manipulate the public sphere. In this emerging paradigm, truth is not simply contested; it is drowned, fragmented, and outcompeted by synthetic narratives optimized for virality. Recognizing and resisting this shift will require more than fact-checking or platform moderation; it demands a cultural and institutional reckoning with the aesthetics of political communication itself. If democracy depends on a shared capacity to distinguish reality from fabrication, then allowing AI slop to dominate the visual and informational landscape risks eroding the very conditions under which democratic life can persist. In this sense, the Trump case is less an outlier than an early warning.