Trump’s Ten-Hour AI Social Media Bender Sparks Fresh Fears of Cognitive Decline

Donald Trump, the eighty-year-old leader of the free world, had a very productive Labor Day Weekend. Over a roughly ten-hour period on Sunday, the U.S. president posted dozens of misleading AI-generated images to Truth Social. They provide an unnerving glimpse into his innermost dreams and delusions—and to some, evidence of his declining cognitive health. His administration has long brushed aside claims of his failing cognitive health as false and politically motivated, but his AI posting spree on Sunday just made that stance a little harder to defend. New calls for his removal from office, invoking the U.S. Constitution’s twenty-fifth amendment, have already been cropping up online. Trump has long leaned on AI to spread unsubstantiated claims on the internet—or, depending on the circumstances, as a scapegoat to brush aside politically or personally damning claims. His most recent posting spree had many of the propagandistic trademarks of his usual online presence: the U.S. will prevail no matter the cost, our enemies will crumble before us, and everything’s okay. War propaganda Many of the images from Sunday focus on the war in Iran, which has become mired in another round of retaliatory strikes with no clear end in sight. The U.S. military said Saturday that it had struck three Iranian oil tankers after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed responsibility for attacks on two U.S. vessels, an aircraft carrier and a destroyer. One AI-generated image Trump posted Sunday afternoon showed a U.S. fighter jet descending on Kharg, an Iranian island in the Persian Gulf from which around 90% of the country’s crude oil is exported. A massive explosion engulfs the island in the image, beneath the words, “Bye bye, Kharg.” Like AI creating images of people with extra fingers, Trump’s AI-generated jet has three rear exhaust nozzles—real fighter jets only have one or two. Another obviously AI-generated image shows Trump wielding a red white and blue sledgehammer, crushing a small plate of mud labeled as Iran. Earlier in the day, he posted a chart claiming “IRAN HAS HYPERINFLATION,” without citing sources of any kind. While the war has led to a steep rise in the country’s rate of inflation—exacerbated by the Trump administration’s efforts to strangle the Iranian economy, dubbed “Operation Economic Outcast”—it hasn’t yet crossed the widely agreed-upon technical threshold for hyperinflation (a monthly rise of 50% or more). Iran also has ways of relieving some of the economic pressure from the American embargo, for example by selling the majority of its oil to China and using cryptocurrency to avoid U.S. sanctions. “New America” The ongoing war in Iran wasn’t the only issue weighing on Trump’s mind during his latest Truth Social posting spree: He’s also forging ahead with his mission to aggravate longtime American allies in the pettiest ways imaginable. Trump posted several AI-generated images on Sunday showing the state of New Mexico labeled on maps as “New America”—an apparent hint at what could become his latest geographical renaming pet project. Late last month, Trump signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario, one of the Great Lakes sitting along the U.S.-Canada border, “Lake America.” He also signed another executive order in January of last year, on his first day back in office, renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” No other countries are under any legal obligation to adopt Trump’s names for these features. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has already said the country will continue using the name Lake Ontario. Messiah complex The main theme from the spate of AI-generated images was Trump depicting himself as being front-and-center of global events, the hero of American salvation and imperial ambition. He didn’t go so far as to post any more images of himself as a Jesus figure—that was a little over the top for even his most loyal fanbase—but the new images have an unmistakably similar flavor. One image that looks like a sloppy piece of concept art for the interior of the Death Star shows Trump seated at the helm of a spaceship, wearing a tie emblazoned with the Space Force logo, looking menacingly at the viewer. Outside a large window behind him hovers the Earth, and two mushroom-shaped explosions emerging from the ocean. Another image showed Trump on the deck of an American warship, wearing a bulletproof vest and looking through binoculars out onto numerous oncoming ships engulfed in flames—almost certainly another reference to the weekend’s fighting in the Persian Gulf. It wasn’t all fire and fury, though; he also tried to tell the American people that he was their financial savior, despite what his critics might say against him. “I’ve made Hundreds of Billions of Dollars on Stocks, and many other type Holdings, for the U.S.A., not myself, and all I do is get criticized by the Radical Left Dumocrats,” he wrote in a post above an image of himself sitting in the Oval Office before four monitors, like Bradley Cooper in Limitless, displaying the rising stock price of Intel. “Very unfair, but what can you do!” The Trump administration announced last summer it would invest close to $9 billion in Intel common stock. On Tuesday morning, the American chipmaker announced its earnings for the second quarter of this year were 25% higher than the previous quarter, its biggest quarterly revenue leap in fifteen years. Earlier this year, the White House called the Intel investment “a direct windfall for American taxpayers and a major boost for domestic manufacturing.” Probably the most unsettling of all the new images was one depicting the president, wearing a long black trenchcoat, in the midst of what looks like a Blade Runner-esque hellscape. He’s flanked on both sides by red-eyed insectoid machines and faceless soldiers. In bright red letters underneath: “THEY WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN.” It’s very difficult to imagine how the president, in the throes of of megolomaniacal posting spree, could’ve possibly looked at this image before posting and thought to himself: This will put Americans’ minds at ease and make me look like the good guy. But in the age of AI, any deranged dreamworld can, with the right prompt, start to look real.