Decoding Donald Trump’s Love of A.I. Imagery
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
WNYC Studios and The New Yorker
4.2 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
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Summary
The New Yorker staff writer Katy Waldman joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss Donald Trump’s fondness for A.I.-generated memes and what it tells us about our current political climate. They talk about how Trump uses these images to bend the cultural narrative to his will, why the MAGA aesthetic is tailor-made for the age of A.I., and how the proliferation of A.I. slop is damaging our brains.
This week’s reading:
- “Trump Is the Emperor of A.I. Slop,” by Katy Waldman
- “My Brain Finally Broke,” by Jia Tolentino
- “How Is Elon Musk Powering His Supercomputer?,” by Bill McKibben
- “Is This the End of the Separation of Church and State?,” by Ruth Marcus
- “Twelve Migrants Sharing a Queens Apartment,” by Jordan Salama
- “How Russia and Ukraine Are Playing Trump’s Blame Game,” by Joshua Yaffa
To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected].
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, Katie. |
| 0:07.7 | Hey, Tyler. |
| 0:08.4 | How are you? |
| 0:09.0 | I'm good. |
| 0:09.6 | Thank you so much for being here. |
| 0:11.1 | I'm super excited. |
| 0:12.3 | You recently wrote a piece in which you described President Trump as the emperor of AI Slop. |
| 0:17.5 | I feel like he would enjoy the emperor part, but not necessarily the AI slop part. |
| 0:22.2 | Would you be able to explain how you came up with this term? |
| 0:25.1 | Yeah. So originally I was thinking more just generally about Trump's aesthetic and like what defined it. |
| 0:32.6 | And I was really struggling because the sort of signifiers around him didn't seem to cohere into like one picture, really. |
| 0:40.7 | It was like, on one hand, there's McDonald's, and on the other hand, there's golf, and then there's golden bathroom fixtures. |
| 0:48.0 | There were lots of things that very strongly conveyed a particular persona, but they didn't really congeal to me into one particular |
| 0:56.0 | person. And so I guess I was looking deeper into what he might be trying to communicate with his |
| 1:04.9 | aesthetic. And the theme that kept emerging was like he didn't want vulnerability in any of his self-presentation. |
| 1:14.5 | He didn't want any ambiguity. |
| 1:17.0 | And that sort of struck me as sort of anti-human in a way. |
| 1:21.3 | And so that made me think, okay, what doesn't have weakness or fallibility? |
| 1:27.3 | What isn't interdependent? And what doesn't have weakness or fallibility, what isn't interdependent, and what doesn't have a lot of, like, freedom of interpretation? |
| 1:33.5 | And that sort of led me to think more about AI. |
| 1:37.0 | And because he's been so kind of active on digital media, retweeting other people's AI representations of him, that seemed to work really well. |
| 1:47.0 | Last week, the White House posted an AI-generated photo of Donald Trump dressed as the Pope. |
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