At 5.20pm on May 9th, Donald Trump posted to his 12.6 million Truth Social followers an image of himself standing on the deck of a boat, peering through binoculars at burning warships. The image was generated using AI.
Nine seconds later came another: a caricature of Illinois governor JB Pritzker surrounded by piles of fast food with the caption “JB is too busy to keep Chicago safe!”
Over the next 16 minutes, Trump shared a continuing cascade of AI-generated images: Iran’s navy at the bottom of the ocean; a UFC fight staged on the White House lawn; the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool coloured an impossibly bright blue.
These images were part of a cavalcade of AI-generated images Trump posted in recent weeks. The number of AI images he has posted on Truth Social has surged seven-fold in May.
RM Block
Trump had taken “a headfirst dive” into what was becoming known as “slopaganda”, said Henry Ajder, an expert on AI and deepfakes, describing the approach as a “systemic embrace” of this “new means of communication”.
AI has allowed him to produce faster, more resonant posts that attack opponents, dramatise policy ideas and mythologise himself. The images have turned his feed into a rolling stream of AI-generated spectacle: imagined military victories, religious iconography and fantasy infrastructure projects.
“It is an extension of his verbal rhetoric ... it aggrandises him and it denigrates those he opposes,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Centre at the University of Pennsylvania.
Trump has posted more than 2,700 times on Truth Social in 2026 – equivalent to more than 19 posts a day – with almost half of these containing images or videos, helping him dominate the attention economy outside of formal media appearances.
At least 75 of those appear to have been generated using AI, using a conservative methodology that is likely to undercount the true number. But 57 of those posts came in just the first three weeks of May, compared with eight for all of April.
The White House said Truth Social was one way that Trump “communicates directly and authentically with the American people and the world. The American people have never had a president as transparent as President Trump, who shares his thoughts with them in real time on all the important issues of the day.”
It is unclear how much of the feed is written or posted by Trump himself, by his team or a combination of both.
White House communications have shown Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp helping to write a social media post and then handing out printouts of it to visiting European leaders. Harp often presents him with draft printouts of proposed messages, sometimes repurposed from other accounts, according to the Wall Street Journal.
He posts throughout the day, with the most popular period between 9pm and 10pm US eastern time (2am and 3am Irish time).
In some posts, Trump depicts himself as an action hero. In January, he shared an image of himself planting the American flag in Greenland. In another, he faces the camera with a machine gun in hand, under the caption “NO MORE MR NICE GUY”.
“It’s as if you had a mental readout of his fantasy life and a projection of what he’d like to be seen as,” said Hall Jamieson.
Many posts use fantastical scenarios to degrade his opponents. In October last year during the “No Kings” protest, Trump posted an AI video of himself dropping brown waste on protesters from a jet.
Such motifs were common in authoritarian regimes’ state media, said Henk van Ess, an expert in online research methods.
“Two moves recur. One glorifies the leader: strong, calm, historic. The other constructs an enemy: a criminal, a threat or something less than human,” he said, explaining that AI had made it possible to present this messaging at much greater speed. “This is the Russian playbook with an American accent.”
Trump often crosses the line between humour and offence. In February, he posted and subsequently deleted a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. The clip was at the end of a video containing claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election. Trump said he “didn’t see the whole thing”, “didn’t make a mistake” and refused to apologise.
Last month, Trump faced backlash from some of his most prominent allies on the religious right when he posted an image of himself as a Jesus-like figure. He defended the post, saying: “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better. And I do make people better. I make people a lot better.”
It was not the first religious-themed image he had posted. He has also depicted himself as the pope and shared an image of himself hugging Jesus.
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AI gives Trump a frictionless way to claim symbolic identities – warrior, healer, pope, redeemer – without needing rallies or speeches to do it.
“Even when people are told that certain realistic AI-generated content they viewed is fake, it can still change the way they see someone,” said Ajder.
Trump has also regularly shared fake imagery showing infrastructure projects or imagined futures.
Last year, Trump posted a video highlighting his radical proposals to redevelop the Gaza Strip. More recently, he shared an image of a Trump Tower on the moon and renders of his new “TRIUMPHAL ARCH” monument.
The posts show how Trump is using AI to visualise political fantasies and promises long before they exist in reality.
On Sunday evening, Trump turned his attention to space. He posted AI imagery of himself firing missiles from a spaceship and then another walking side-by-side with an alien shackled in chains.
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If Trump’s first presidency was defined by meme warfare, experts say AI has supercharged that strategy into a vast visual ecosystem. “What has become very clear is that whether you like it or not ... it is resonant. AI-generated content is just consistently some of the most viewed content now online,” Ajder said. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
