Make America Deepfaked Again

AI isn’t just reshaping politics; it’s erasing reality itself. With Trump weaponizing synthetic media to inflate his image, America risks losing the very ability to know truth from fiction.

Guest article by Michael Cohen. Follow him on Substack for more by clicking here.

Not long before midnight, with the government in freefall and millions of Americans wondering how they’ll pay their bills during yet another Trump-engineered shutdown, our Commander-in-Chief decided the moment called for… wait for it… slapstick. So up goes a video on Truth Social: Trump in the Oval Office, cackling like a bad Vegas impressionist, tossing a red MAGA hat onto someone’s head while the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” blares. Harmless fun? Not quite. The video was fake—AI-fabricated, designed to lampoon Hakeem Jeffries. This is where we are in 2025: America’s president is leading a government shutdown while spending his midnight hours reposting deepfakes. And millions of people can’t tell what’s real anymore.

I’ll say this bluntly because it needs to be said: Trump is no pioneer in technology, he’s not a futurist, and he sure as hell isn’t an innovator. He’s a showman who knows one thing better than anyone else alive: how to manipulate media to build an alternate reality where he always wins, he’s always strong, and everyone else looks like a clown. And now, with artificial intelligence at his disposal, he doesn’t even need the tabloids or Fox News to run interference. He can make his own reality. Literally.

Think about it: Trump has flooded his Truth Social feed with dozens of AI-generated images and videos since he dragged himself back into the Oval Office. Some are cartoonish—Trump next to a roaring lion, Trump as Superman, Trump as a rock star. Others are far more sinister: a deepfake of Nancy Pelosi “confessing to crimes,” a fake video of Barack Obama being arrested by the FBI, a doctored scene of Adam Schiff in handcuffs. These aren’t jokes. They’re digital Molotov cocktails, lobbed straight into an already fractured public square. And let’s not pretend this is just “silly meme culture.” Trump knows the polls are brutal. His approval numbers are cratering as the shutdown drags on and inflation eats away at working families. So what’s the solution? Distract, distort, and drown the truth in so much fake content that people can’t distinguish fantasy from reality. If he can’t make America great again, he’ll at least make it confused enough not to notice how bad things are.

I know this pattern because I lived it. For years, I helped build the version of Trump that the public was meant to see. Back then, it wasn’t AI; it was tabloids, gossip columns, and carefully staged photographs. I’d plant a story about his business success while, behind the scenes, trying to hold things together with creditors. We’d promote his events as “the biggest in history,” even when the reality was far smaller. At the time, it felt like image-making, spin, part of the game. Looking back, I see it for what it really was: the creation of an alternate reality that blurred the truth. The difference today is technology. Back then, we had to lie the old-fashioned way—with spin, staging, and selective leaks. Now, you can conjure an entire fiction in 60 seconds with the right AI tool. Trump as Pope? Done. Trump as a fighter pilot? Done. Trump presiding over Gaza like a biblical king? Done. A single click, and suddenly millions believe—or at least half-believe—that the fiction is fact.

The most dangerous part? Trump isn’t just entertaining his followers; he’s shaping their perception of reality itself. Experts warn that generative AI “bends reality.” I’d go further: it snaps it in half. When millions of Americans see Trump in memes more often than they see him governing, they start to believe the myth of Trump, not the truth of Trump. And that myth—that he’s powerful, unshakable, even heroic—becomes more dangerous than the imperfect, ordinary man who exists behind the curtain.

This is no accident. The White House has admitted that AI-powered propaganda is a deliberate strategy. Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, said it’s “refreshing” that the president posts memes and deepfakes. They want you to think it’s all harmless fun. But when the president of the United States shares fabricated videos of political rivals confessing to crimes, or doctored images of government policy proposals that don’t exist, that isn’t fun. That’s weaponized disinformation. We’re not just watching Trump clown around with AI. We’re watching the erosion of truth as a shared foundation of American life. The same man who shouted “fake news” into existence now relies on actual fake news to prop himself up.

The bitter irony? For all the AI hype, for all the memes and deepfakes, Trump is still deeply unpopular. No manipulated lion photo or CGI pep rally changes that. He’s drowning in the same discontent he always has, only now he’s trying to Photoshop his way out of it. So here’s the real question: Do we laugh at the absurdity of Trump as a Journey band member, or do we finally admit that every “funny” deepfake is part of a larger, darker strategy—to keep us so entertained, so distracted, so disoriented that we stop fighting back?

Because once reality itself collapses under the weight of AI propaganda, it won’t just be Trump’s followers who don’t know what’s real anymore. It’ll be all of us. And when that happens, the joke won’t be on him. It’ll be on America.

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