Trump’s artificial images
The AI-generated meme is this administration’s house style—moral degradation made visible.
The official White House account on X posts AI memes nearly every day, ranging from the almost sort of funny (Trump as pope) to the wearily didactic (a mockup of the Obama 2008 campaign poster by Shepard Fairey that replaces the word “HOPE” with “ILLEGAL ALIEN CHILD RAPIST FOUND AT MASSACHUSETTS DAYCARE”) to the morally repulsive (an image of an ICE agent arresting a sobbing woman, rendered in the style of the Japanese animated films from Studio Ghibli). AI-generated memes are to this administration what the collective ecstasy of the rally and the defiant tackiness of the MAGA hat were to the first: the house style that determines the tone of national life.
In his 1981 book The Kennedy Imprisonment, Garry Wills reflected of John F. Kennedy’s curious combination of dazzling stylishness and political vacuity. No one could really say what exactly JFK stood for, but everyone could agree he had style. According to Wills, this was a deliberate strategy, a politics of presidential style. For the courtiers of Camelot, style was politics. “In this view,” Wills writes, “presidential style not only establishes an agenda for politics but determines the tone of national life. The image projected by the President becomes the country’s self-image, sets the expectations to which it lives up or down.”
The tone determined by the Trump administration’s AI memes is shrill and cruel. The images seem to call forth the violence they depict. By the time the ICE image was posted, the Studio Ghibli meme was already stale. AI image generators make the life cycle of a meme grow shorter and shorter, so the archive of violent images from which the next meme can be extruded must expand faster and faster. The images ask us to deepen our craving for violence, inviting us to see the suffering of another person as simply raw material to be processed into the microsecond of numbed enjoyment we get from scrolling past a meme on the way to the next one. To rework Wills a bit: The AI meme posted by the President becomes the country’s self-image, sets the expectations to which it lives down.
