Over the weekend, President Donald Trump invoked “Apocalypse Now” to threaten a military crackdown in Chicago ― one of the American cities he’s claimed is so crime ridden, he wants to send in the National Guard.
This being President Trump ― a man who’s been called “the emperor of AI slop” by The New Yorker ― he did so by sharing a ludicrous AI-generated image of himself as Robert Duvall’s character in Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War saga. Crouched down and wearing aviator glasses, Trump watches as Chicago goes up in flames and helicopters fly in.
In the 1979 film, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, played by Duvall as an amoral warmonger, famously delivers the line: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
In the president’s latest AI slop post ― “Chipocalypse Now” ― the caption reads, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning. Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” (Last week, Trump issued an executive order to rename the Department of Defense to the “Department of War,” claiming the former is too “politically correct.”)
Quite a lot to unpack. But a day later, Trump angrily told a reporter that the image ― posted on his own Truth Social account ― was “fake news.”
“We’re not going to war,” he told the reporter, we’re just “going to clean up our cities.”
In any case, the weird imagery ― showing Trump slimmer and buffer than he’s ever been ― is nothing new for the president. He and his most ardent followers often post corny AI-generated portraits of the president looking like a macho, macho man.
Through the faux artistry of AI, he’s envisioned himself as a slim George Washington, the fictional boxer “Rocky,” police and SWAT officers, a buff Star Wars Jedi (for Star Wars day, natch) and Superman.
In his first term, Trump and his fanbase gravitated toward the actual art ― though no less schlocky ― of Jon McNaughton, a painter who calls himself the “foremost conservative artist.” In “Crossing the Swamp,” from 2018, McNaughton envisioned Trump as George Washington, holding a lantern as Nikki Haley, Ben Carson and others in his then-Cabinet row over the murky waters of the Delaware. Now, they’ve got AI at their disposal.
Like many of us, Nick Cull, a historian of propaganda and professor of communication at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, finds these images fascinating.
Cull said there are countless examples of leaders using hyperbolized images to enhance their power through history: Egyptian carvings that show the pharaoh as an exaggerated giant and his enemies as tiny imps, or American newspaper cartoons depicting previous presidents as superheroes or similar.
Authoritarian leaders like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Putin have all used propaganda to cast themselves as outsized, strongman leaders. President Theodore Roosevelt ― another rich New Yorker like Trump ― styled himself as a “cowboy-soldier-statesman.”
Cull said what’s new and entirely unconventional with Trump’s AI posting is the collapse of walls between genres: The media isn’t calling Trump “Superman.” He’s not riding on a horse shirtless like Putin or dressed up in SWAT or border patrol cosplay for press conferences or ride-alongs (though his Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, certainly is).
Instead, the president of the United States is behind a smartphone screen re-posting goofy, self-aggrandizing AI tributes to himself, like a teenage shitposter or an AI-obsessed Boomer.
“The president is behaving more like a social media influencer sharing fan art than a traditional U.S. politician,” Cull told HuffPost.
When the president himself shares images that might be read as satire — for instance, that bizarre AI video he posted in February depicting his vision for the future of the Gaza Strip (“Trump Gaza”)― “there’s no room for satire” at this point, Cull said. Everything is so surreal, it’s hard to wrap your brain around.
It’s striking, too, Cull said, that so many of the images play into exaggerated ideas of masculinity.
“But that’s all consistent with MAGA gender culture,” he said. The women are “Mar-a-Lago faced” and hyper feminine. Then men are brawny and bronzed ― well, at least bronzed.
Trump and MAGA’s insistence on portraying the president as a buff, burly action star is easy to parody. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has shared some of over-the-top AI portraits of himself ― buff on horseback, for instance, or shirtless in front of a California grizzly bear ― as he continues to use social media to mock the president by emulating the latter’s posting style.
Who are these images for? Low-information voters, as well as the most MAGA faithful.
Images like these work fast to convey messages of masculine power and virility, reinforcing the idea of “strong, fearless leader,” said Renee Hobbs, a professor of Communication Studies at Harrington School of Communication and Media at the University of Rhode Island.
“This is appealing to many people whose understanding of current events is rooted in entertainment and sports,” she said. “These messages are not targeting people who follow news and current events.”
Trump boosts his cult of personality with each new reshare, but his posting is also a little self-serving. He likes the AI slop tributes, too, said Cara Finnegan, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Trump is “uniquely obsessed with imagery of himself,” she said.
This is, after all, a man who, prior to the presidency, hung in his golf clubs fake Time magazine covers with his face on them and a headline proclaiming “Donald Trump: The ‘Apprentice’ is a television smash!”
“Honestly, I think a key audience for these images is himself,” said Finnegan. “He needs to see himself in these ways in order to feel important, he wants others to know this is how he wants to be seen.”
Recognizing this, Finnegan said his supporters make more images as a form of ingratiation. It’s not unlike how he holds Cabinet meetings where he makes people go around the table and say nice things about him.
“The images and the circulation of them feed one another ― supporters make the images of Trump, Trump consumes and recirculates them ― and on it continues,” the professor said.
The most devoted in MAGA really do get hyped up by these images ― they feel like a genuine in-group morale boost, not an act of groveling ― which is why Newsom’s trolling works so well.
“Trump’s supporters were so inside of the image obsession that they couldn’t even tell they were being made fun of, apparently,” Finnegan said. “That tells you something about the most strident of his supporters.”
It’s not just all harmless AI fun, though.
Critical ignoring is the ability to choose what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. In Trump’s America, though, we critically ignore at our own peril. Even the memes are saying something.
“[Those who see] Trump as merely a clown are likely to miss the point of his compelling and timeless communication strategy,” Hobbs said.
The “Apocalypse Now” meme is particularly unnerving. On Saturday, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker responded to Trump’s post, remarking that, if taken at face value, “The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city.”
“This is not a joke. This is not normal,” Pritzker wrote in a post on X. “Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.”
“The Trump Administration is using memes to turn mass deportation into one big joke,” Wired wrote recently, pointing to the White House’s “Illegal alien ASMR” video or a recent video that incorporated the viral “Nothing Beats a Jet2 Holiday” tune alongside footage of ICE detainees in handcuffs boarding a deportation plane. This isn’t some edgelord teen’s feed; it’s the White House’s official Instagram account.
The cruelty of the videos ― and even images of Trump as the strongman leader he sees himself as ― are plenty revealing and shouldn’t be ignored.
“Images like the ‘Apocalypse Now’ meme point symbolically to where Trump would love to go in terms of policy and where he will go if unchecked,” Finn said. “We should not dismiss these images as ‘just jokes’ or fun parodies. They are feeding into and broadcasting Trump’s authoritarian aspirations, and doing so loud and clear.”