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I work hard in my writing to not re-deliver the emotional payload of the Trump regime’s AI slop, video content designed to viscerally and politically manipulate its viewers. I don’t believe in reposting the videos or quote-tweeting the content. I use words to describe what it is we are seeing and why we are seeing it, as I did when I was compelled to report on the White House aliens video. This stuff is toxic and dangerous and needs to be handled with care.
As I was pondering the latest deluge of AI videos released by the White House, a new portmanteau popped into my head — Sloptocracy. I define it as “an autocratic regime for whom AI slop is a primary tool of governance.”
The horror, of course, is that it is real.
Trump is using AI slop to paralyze and traumatize the population for political gains. Evidence that he is attempting to turn the US into a Sloptocracy has been available since his first term, when he shared manipulated and edited videos on social media, becoming the first President to earn a ‘manipulated media’ warning label on a tweet.
But over are the days of the occasional video release, often violent and cruel as Trump took aim at perceived political enemies. Now, his administration releases a constant stream of videos created with AI-technology.
This week, Trump’s AI fakes included “footage” of Iran’s Kharg Island oil storage tanks and refineries being bombed, an alarming move during a war; a fake of Trump kicking over a Lake Ontario sign; and an army of armed Trump-wigged ducks.
French historian and author David Colon, who specializes in media history and information manipulation, says the Trump administration uses AI to produce “‘slopaganda’ — low-quality content churned out quickly with the aim of manipulating emotions for political ends.”
Colon told Byline Times: “I’m not sure if its goal is to erode reality the way the Kremlin does. I get the impression that it’s more about creating an alternative reality that aligns with its beliefs and policies.”
That alternative reality also exhausts rational minds, who see it as a way to groom people into a daze so they’re ineffective when real-life threats require urgent action.
Political philosopher Dr Michael MacKay told Byline Times: “AI-generated imagery is fake. People know it is fake, especially with the fantastical and grotesque output of the Trump regime.”
But he said our normal response mechanisms to these fakes are being altered by Trump’s infinite nihilism.
“Normally, we would expect rational human beings to reject false sensory inputs because they are contrary to the evolutionary imperative: our need to survive,” he explained. “We survive best by understanding primary reality, which is the one world we all share. But in the dystopian world of nihilism projected by Trump and the MAGA cult, AI slop is embraced as an excuse to put aside reason and embrace the negative emotions of hate, resentment and drive for domination. AI slop is directed at the id, not the ego or the superego.”
He said the US’s declining education standards and “culture of anti-intellectualism” has left much of American society unprepared to cope with “the complexity and nuance of the world” compared to other countries.
“Iran is an incredibly rich nation with a history going back to the beginning of human beings living in cities,” he said. “Canada is made up of First Nations, the descendents of French and British settlers, and ‘New Canadians’; it has a political culture that 250 years ago diverged radically from that in the United States.
“But MAGA cultists aren’t prepared to think about any of that. They are comfortable wallowing in the lies of Trump’s AI slop because it reaches them on a visceral level. Large numbers of people get a thrill watching a fake Trump kick over a Lake Ontario sign. They ignore the reality that Trump is a morbidly obese, terminally unfit 80-year-old who could not possibly do such a thing.”
David Colon, who teaches at Sciences Po Paris where he is also a researcher, said he’s less concerned about Trump’s “slopaganda than his systemic attack on epistemic authorities—whether the media, universities, or research institutions.”
Colon cited the example of Trump’s dismantling of the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. He said that the act“effectively interrupts the Keeling Curve—and the deactivation of NASA satellites tasked with monitoring the climate risk, depriving us of the very ability to agree on the facts regarding global warming.”
Investigative reporter and author Craig Unger, who has written multiple books on Trump’s ties to Russia, said the inability to come to a collective consensus on facts is all part of strategic attacks on reality to benefit autocratic — or Sloptocratic — goals.
“Trump and the Russians have created a world in which there is no shared reality,” he told Byline Times.
Stop the Slop
After Trump posted the AI fake about bombing Kharg Island, his Vice President JD Vance excused the intended threat by telling reporters that Trump “likes to switch it up on social media a little bit”.
In a Sloptocracy, posting AI fakes during a real war is not switching it up, it’s muddying reality, which in effect serves as an act of war on his own people, as well as the target country.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney put out a demand this week that “the Americans stop doing memes,” after the latest round of AI slop targeting Canada.
Clearly, Trump leans on memetic warfare to push his poisonous political agenda but also to push his criminal profiteering.
In a lawsuit filed three weeks ago in New York federal court by The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Trump and two of his White House aides, Dan Scavino and Natalie Harp — both of whom help Trump post on social media — are being sued to prevent him from charging up to $100,000 monthly for early access to his Truth Social posts. The lawsuit claims it violates the First Amendment right to the President’s public announcement. But another objective of the lawsuit is to force a federal judge to declare that the act of posting official Government information exclusively on Truth Social is unconstitutional.
With reports that Trump’s much ballyhooed ballroom bunker may also contain a data center along with a drone port, it’s unlikely he’ll stop the slop without some kind of intervention.
“Even if millions of Americans choose to live in the empty, dead-end fantasy of Trump’s AI garbage, that would not be a problem if it didn’t affect anybody else,” Dr Michael MacKay said. “But it is a problem for the whole world because US aggression is now fueled by artificial intelligence enlisted to the cause of evil. The lies of Trump, following from the lies of Putin, are an immediate threat to global peace and security. Free people everywhere must embrace hard reality, challenge the AI-generated fakery, and confront the bullies with every bit of strength, courage and intelligence we have.”
Emmy award-winning investigative reporter Heidi Siegmund Cuda is an American correspondent for Byline Times and her Hot Type column runs bimonthly. She is a #1 Amazon bestselling author, and her Bette Dangerous Substack is read in 102 countries.