Last Sunday, on the day that millions of Americans gathered in multiple cities for a series of “No Kings” protests against the growing authoritarianism of Donald Trump’s second presidency, an AI-generated video mocking the protests was posted to Trump’s official account on Truth Social. This is the social media app he himself owns, and of which he is by some distance the most prominent user.
The video, which is about 20 seconds long, depicts the president wearing a golden crown encrusted with jewels, and sitting in the cockpit of an F16 fighter jet, along the fuselage of which is printed KING TRUMP. To the soundtrack of Kenny Loggins’s 1986 single Danger Zone from the film Top Gun, Trump flies over a crowd of protestors, and releases from on high a torrent of liquid shit. We see demonstrators in the streets react in shock as they are covered in a viscous slop of faeces, and then a series of fast edits reveal further cascades of shit pouring from the heavens on to hordes of anti-Trump demonstrators, as though the gods themselves have diarrhoea.
The clip would be absurd and off-putting enough if it were just a bit of AI-generated detritus languishing on some obscure trollish corner of the internet; broadcast by the US president on his official account on his proprietary social media platform, it is something else entirely.
The video’s message, in one sense, could hardly be more obvious: it depicts nothing more complex than Trump’s utter contempt for his political opponents – in this case, the several million US citizens who showed up to the protests on Sunday to register their discontent with the spreading corruption and authoritarianism of his presidency. “Here’s me,” he is saying, “a literal king, shitting on your democratic protest from a height.”
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But the basic visual elements of the video can also be read – in fact demand to be read – as emanations of a deep political unconscious. Watching it, I was reminded of Male Fantasies, the German sociologist Klaus Theweleit’s two-volume exegesis of the literary works (novels, private diaries, unpublished memoirs) produced by members of the ultra-right-wing Freikorps militias during the Weimar years. Theweleit’s study is a profile of authoritarian manhood, an investigation of its deep sexual and bodily neuroses, and of the psychic roots of national socialism. In these writings, Theweleit finds overwhelming evidence of an obsession with bodily fluids, an obsession which leaks into a fear and hatred of both left-wing revolutionary movements and women.
These men lived in terror of the permeability of boundaries, and in particular the permeability of their own selves. In their writings, their political enemies are repeatedly associated with liquids, with oozing and ungovernable fluids – menstrual blood, urine, excrement – that threaten to overwhelm their own hard-armoured, machine-like bodies. Among the countless examples of this language given by Theweleit is one passage from the first World War hero and wildly popular memoirist Ernst Junger, who describes the republic as a “Marxist wave of mire” and “a wave of blood and excrement”.
Watching the AI video posted by Trump – with its weird juxtaposition of military hardware and bodily fluid, with its heaving masses saturated in liquid excrement – I found myself wondering what Theweleit might make of it. It seems to me a contemporary manifestation of exactly the kind of reactionary fever-dream Male Fantasies examines in such forensic detail.
It’s an example of pure psychic projection: the grandiose and impermeable ego, and the loathed and abject other that threatens its supremacy. The president sits crowned and invulnerable in his fighter jet, a kind of armoured prosthetic body (it is the jet itself, after all, that is labelled KING TRUMP), which opens its mechanised anus to relieve its liquid load of effluvium on to the naked and unprotected heads of the ungrateful subjects far below.
The Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson attempted to defend the president’s posting of the video by saying that it was “satire”. The idea of a US president satirising American citizens protesting him is, of course, a self-evidently absurd inversion of the meaning and purpose of satire. But at the same time, it’s only a few degrees away from some version of the truth: paradoxically, the video is far more legible as satire of Trump than it is as a satire by him. It vividly, if grotesquely, visualises what he has been doing to the world. It’s not very sophisticated satire, certainly, but then again we live in profoundly unsophisticated times.
In fact, one way we might understand the video is as an unintentional portrayal of how spaces of public discourse have been systematically degraded and befouled, most notably (but not solely) by Trump and his fellow travellers. One of the most indelible, and notorious, political expressions of our time comes from Steve Bannon, the chief strategist of Trump’s first presidential campaign. “The real opposition is the media,” as he put it to the American journalist Michael Lewis in the early days of Trump’s first term. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
That last phrase came to encapsulate the success of the Trump administration, and the wider MAGA movement, in overwhelming the space of public discourse with vast amounts of misleading, confusing and irrelevant content. The rise of generative AI has vastly increased the shit-flooding capacity of Trump’s propaganda machine.
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In a way, I’m wary of my own desire to analyse something so manifestly stupid and trivial. Posting a dumb scatological joke on social media would not make any list of the most egregious sins of Trump’s second presidency. (This is an administration, I need hardly point out, that has armed a campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, carried out multiple extrajudicial killings of alleged drug traffickers in territories of other states, and which, at home, is employing a heavily militarised immigration and customs enforcement agency as a tool of intimidation and stochastic terror.) But its very unremarkableness – the extent to which it’s tempting to pass it over as just one more bizarre and depressing entry in a near-infinite registry of such things – might be the most remarkable thing about it.
