AI-assisted images of Trump as pope or Star Wars villain are being preserved in the Library of Congress, via White House tweets. Welcome to the dumbest era in U.S. history.
Image: White House/X
When then-former president Donald Trump introduced a line of NFTs in December 2022, he was widely mocked for it. The digital trading cards alternately depicted Trump as a muscle-bound superhero, a cowboy, and an astronaut—like some antiquated fever dream of inspirational masculinity. Coming so soon after a stinging midterm election, in which nearly as many Trump-backed candidates in competitive races lost as those who won, it seemed like a desperate, cringy cash grab from a political supernova, mid-explosion.
All the ridicule around Trump’s stratospheric self-image, however, turned out to be a blip. Crucially, the NFTs sold out in less than 24 hours, raising an estimated $4.4 million, and like seemingly every obstacle in Trump’s charmed political career, he incurred no lasting damage from the episode. Now that Trump has resumed his presidency, his White House has apparently internalised this lesson. Its official X account now regularly blasts out similarly cringy portraiture, culminating over the weekend in AI-assisted images of Trump as the next pope and a shredded Sith Lord from Star Wars. Government channels are reaching uncharted levels of embarrassment, having ratcheted up the 4chan factor both to emphasise Trump’s world-beating dominance and communicate official policy. And they may just be getting warmed up.
Ever since the inauguration in January, the White House’s X account has served up a cosmic gumbo of horn-tooting and antagonistic trolling. Reflecting the president’s relentless command of the attention economy, it often retweets various characters from the Trump Cinematic Universe—JD Vance, Elon Musk, and Kristi Noem, for instance—in between provocative posts designed to reach maximum eyeballs. The account codified its house style for the latter early on with an exhibition of mirthful hostility. Viral entries in this genre included an “ASMR” video about deportations, a Valentine’s Day card about deportations, and a Studio Ghibli–style AI rendering of, well, more deportations.
Last weekend, however, the account went into overdrive. Beyond the AI rendering of Pope Trump, in the wake of Pope Francis’s recent death, and the May the Fourth–timed image of the president wielding a red lightsaber, there were similar posts celebrating the ostensible defunding of PBS and NPR, several posts mocking the groundswell of support for mistakenly imprisoned immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, some celebrating Trump’s attacks on DEI, and a 46-hour video entitled “Lo-Fi MAGA Video to Relax/Study To,” slowly listing Trump’s accomplishments next to a cartoon-Trump writing from the Resolute Desk. (The use of the word “study” in that title suggests which age group this account is tweeting for.)
While the tweet depicting Trump as Pope Francis’s successor had the furthest reach, with 103 million views, and proved the most contentious, with Catholics responding in an uproar, the Star Wars post might be the most mortifying of the bunch. Why is Trump more yoked than a Wrestlemania contestant, for instance? And why is his lightsaber incorrectly the colour of the bad guys in the Star Wars universe? (Or correctly colored, as Luke Skywalker himself joked.)
There’s a world of difference between Candidate Trump selling worthless digital trinkets cosplaying various boyhood fantasies, and the White House tweeting such pap from the perch of the presidency. Now that these dispatches come from the communications apparatus of the U.S. government, they’re more than just embarrassing or cringe. Considering that, as some are pointing out online, all White House tweets are preserved in the Library of Congress, these goofy-cruel schoolyard taunts will now have a permanent echo in American history.
Coming right on the heels of the Biden’s administration’s blissfully boring institutional tone, the Trump 2 White House’s X account is giving rocket-ship-level whiplash. Social channels during Biden’s term were so comparatively tame, it was kind of a big, boundary-pushing deal in 2022 when some of Biden’s staffers and a Democratic Senator posted Dark Brandon memes, depicting Biden as a supernatural mastermind equipped with fiery eye-lasers. It was an even bigger deal when Biden himself posted the meme in a playful tweet following last year’s Super Bowl.
What is happening on the official White House X account these days, however, would seem like an escalation even if it came straight after Trump’s first term. Between 2017 and 2020, the president’s Twitter account was a constant source of brazen, combative, and often inflammatory posts, while the official accounts generally maintained a more traditional posture. With sanitised summaries of all the unfurling chaos, the official White House account acted as a normalising Zamboni, cleaning up after Trump’s headline-generating posts, to preserve the thin veneer of politics as usual.
Now, the administration’s official communications channels are in sync with Trump’s belligerent, reality-defiant brand, but with the juvenile posting sensibility of X owner Musk to boot. Any given day on X might find the White House’s account framing Trump’s personal beliefs as those of the U.S. government—and woe betide those who share any opposing views. This unified front suggests a deep erosion within the U.S. government of any remaining distance between Trump and Not Trump. It’s a show of supremacy so clear, one couldn’t even miss it from a galaxy far, far away.
It seems to be gaining a following, too. On Monday morning, Semafor released a report that the White House’s X account had garnered two billion impressions in Trump’s first 100 days. For an administration that so clearly thrives on generating attention of any kind, it seems like a big win. The billions of impressions the White House’s Trump-y posts keep racking up only underscores how all of this will look in posterity, though.
There’s a good reason the Library of Congress has no wood engravings of a buff Abe Lincoln freeing America’s slaves with a turbo-musket—and it’s not because AI didn’t exist back then.
