Donald Trump needs artificial intelligence. He lacks the other kind
Donald Trump needs artificial intelligence. He lacks the other kind
https://www.salon.com/2026/05/23/donald-trump-needs-artificial-intelligence-he-lacks-the-other-kind/
Publish Date: 2026-05-23 06:30:00
Source Domain: www.salon.com
Has anyone fallen deeper in love with artificial intelligence than Donald Trump?
The man who threatened to sue the places he attended school to stop them from releasing his grades and who, while playacting as president, regularly badmouths his own country’s intelligence agencies, loves the fakery made possible by AI.
That makes perfect sense. AI is like a fantasy mirror, before which our artificial president cannot stop admiringly preening.
Just as AI is useful for lazy students who don’t want to write that term paper, it’s an unnatural boon for a narcissistic con man. Trump relishes utilizing AI to disparage his political opponents and — most deliciously for him and most gag-inducingly for normal people — to create heroic images of himself, like some latter-day demented Roman emperor.
Someone as lazy and uncreative as Trump is drawn to AI to robotically whip up ludicrous images of himself as Superman or some other musclebound superhero. His AI-generated video showing himself as “King Trump” piloting a fighter jet and dumping a load of feces on No Kings protesters protest was typically puerile and grotesque.
His depictions of himself as the pope or, more recently, as Jesus managed to hit the trifecta: They were adolescent, ludicrous and deeply offensive.
Those are only a few examples of the increasing number of AI-generated deepfake images that the childish mind occupying the Mar-a-Lago North (otherwise known as the White House) has posted so far in his second term.
Come to think of it, by indefatigably puffing himself up as a genius businessman who belonged on the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans — often through the persona of “Trump spokesman” John Barron — or by putting his own face on a faux Time magazine cover, Donald Trump was a deepfake decades before the advent of AI.
By puffing himself up as a genius businessman who belonged on the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans — often through the persona of “Trump…
