Before there was Trump as Jesus, there was Trump as the pope. There was Trump as Rocky. There was Trump in Apocalypse Now, smelling victory.
There was Trump pictured with a red lightsaber like Darth Vader’s, getting into the heads of the resistance on May 4.
To troll “No Kings” rallies, he was shown as a fighter pilot, call sign “King Trump,” dropping excrement bombs on protesters below.
If it seems like silliness and snark, you’re not in on the joke. Trump may realize he crossed a line with the now-deleted Jesus-like post. But stoking Trump’s base feels like a major part of White House communications strategy at a time when people spend time in online echo chambers and get their information from social media feeds.
He’s been pictured by a supporter with an official job at the State Department as a Founding Father, signing what appears to be either the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence — although that AI-generated image is poorly constructed, since he’s writing a feather quill rather than his preferred Sharpie. Laughable.
He’s depicted in a video as a hockey player, ripping up the Canadian defense, and getting into people’s feeds when people were talking about the American Olympic hockey gold.
“Memes are really just visual methods of communication, and I think they allow people to seed ideas into the cultural discourse without overtly having to voice specific ideas or opinions,” the tech journalist Taylor Lorenz, author of “Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet,” told me.
Rather than fully retreat from the deleted post that some Christians viewed as blasphemous, Trump on Wednesday reposted an image of himself next to Jesus, which both acknowledged the previous post and built on it.
Iranians built on the meme too; the country’s embassy to Tajikistan posted a video of Jesus floating down to smite Trump, who was pictured as Jesus. Very meta.
All of these images are a form of deepfake, according to Kaylyn Jackson Schiff, co-director of Purdue University’s Governance and Responsible AI Lab (GRAIL).
That term might be more commonly associated with deceptive content that uses AI to trick people, but it should also apply to obviously fake images. Researchers at GRAIL have created a database of thousands of political deepfakes, or as they clinically refer to it, “synthetic content.”
The first two categories push realistic-seeming images.
“Darkfakes” are deceptive. “This might be a realistic, synthetic image that’s trying to make an opponent look bad,” Jackson Schiff said. Think of the ads produced to make it look like the Texas Democrats’ candidate for US Senate, James Talarico, was actually reading off his old tweets, words he had not said aloud.
“Glowfakes” are positive. “Kind of like a glow-up, making someone look better than they might actually be in reality,” Jackson Schiff said.
Then there are deepfakes that are obviously not real.
“Foefakes” are negative. They’re obviously not real and they portray an opponent in a negative light, effectively trolling them.
“Fanfakes” put a person on a pedestal. Presenting Trump as a Superman or a godlike figure is obviously not real, but Jackson Schiff said it can “amp up enthusiasm and support amongst someone’s base.”
These types of images may or may not be generated by the White House. A version of the image of Trump as a Jesus-like figure was shared back in February by the account of Nick Adams, a right-wing influencer whose title at the State Department is “special presidential envoy for American tourism, exceptionalism and values.”
Adams is a Trump true believer. He has also posted, for instance, an image of Trump seeming to pray in the Oval Office with the ghosts (are they ghosts?) of Martin Luther King Jr., and Abraham Lincoln behind him.
Trump’s relationship with his base is unique in American politics, where rather than being aloof from memes, he amplifies content created on his behalf.
To his supporters, he is seen “interestingly, both as an everyman and as an exalted hero,” Jackson Schiff said.
Lorenz argued that while these images are obviously not real and can seem very silly, they also can have an aggregate impact.
“Does every billboard that you see when you drive to work make you buy something? No. But it worms its way into your brain, and it shapes the way that you think and perceive things,” she said.
Trump is the master of right-wing political influencing, Aidan Walker, who writes the Substack newsletter “How to Do Things With Memes,” told me.
He compared Trump to MrBeast, the YouTube creator. There are lots of people in the same ecosystem as MrBeast, but none of them have nearly the same influence.
“There’s a big whale, and everybody kind of benefits from the draft that they leave behind,” Walker said.
There is no equivalent on the political left at the moment, which could help explain why Democrats have failed to find a unifying leader.
Walker said Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have harnessed power, but it is far different than Trump’s.
“Donald Trump and his team are very good at creating fan fakes that are compelling to his base, to his audience, and that is tapping into a lot of the existing sense to which his supporters put him on a pedestal,” Jackson Schiff said.
You can feel Democrats trying to catch up, such as when California Gov. Gavin Newsom posts an image of Trump as Marie Antoinette — a foefake — to mock Trump’s East Wing reconstruction, or when he turns troll on X.
The trolling element dovetails with modern, divisive politics. But all of it seems very unserious, which can be incongruous with the governing part of being a politician.
The Trump as Jesus image may have originally been posted in tandem with news that Trump was at odds with the pope, but the image itself became a storyline.
That’s also what happened when Trump shared a video that was mostly about unfounded allegations of voter fraud, but ended with racist images of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
The Obamas video and the godlike AI image are two of the rare posts Trump or the White House have actually deleted.
The account that created the racist video, “xerias_x,” still brags about it. That’s the same account that made the AI-generated video of Trump as a fighter pilot dumping on protesters — which was in decidedly poor taste, but which no one took as blasphemy.
CNN’s Dugald McConnell contributed reporting.
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