US president’s stream of fake imagery on Truth Social is reshaping the boundaries of political communicationAI has allowed Donald Trump to produce faster, more resonant posts that attack opponents, dramatise policy ideas and mythologise himself. Illustration: Paul Scott Dan Clark in London and Anna Nicolaou in New YorkFri May 22 2026 - 13:00 • 5 MIN READAt 5.20pm on May 9th, Donald Trump posted to his 12.6 million Truth Social followers an image of himself standing on the deck of a boat, peering through binoculars at burning warships. The image was generated using AI.Nine seconds later came another: a caricature of Illinois governor JB Pritzker surrounded by piles of fast food with the caption “JB is too busy to keep Chicago safe!”Over the next 16 minutes, Trump shared a continuing cascade of AI-generated images: Iran’s navy at the bottom of the ocean; a UFC fight staged on the White House lawn; the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool coloured an impossibly bright blue.These images were part of a cavalcade of AI-generated images Trump posted in recent weeks. The number of AI images he has posted on Truth Social has surged seven-fold in May.Trump had taken “a headfirst dive” into what was becoming known as “slopaganda”, said Henry Ajder, an expert on AI and deepfakes, describing the approach as a “systemic embrace” of this “new means of communication”.Donald Trump has taken a headfirst dive into 'slopaganda' said Henry Ajder, an expert on AI and deepfakes. AI has allowed him to produce faster, more resonant posts that attack opponents, dramatise policy ideas and mythologise himself. The images have turned his feed into a rolling stream of AI-generated spectacle: imagined military victories, religious iconography and fantasy infrastructure projects.“It is an extension of his verbal rhetoric ... it aggrandises him and it denigrates those he opposes,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Centre at the University of Pennsylvania.Trump has posted more than 2,700 times on Truth Social in 2026 – equivalent to more than 19 posts a day – with almost half of these containing images or videos, helping him dominate the attention economy outside of formal media appearances.At least 75 of those appear to have been generated using AI, using a conservative methodology that is likely to undercount the true number. But 57 of those posts came in just the first three weeks of May, compared with eight for all of April.The White House said Truth Social was one way that Trump “communicates directly and authentically with the American people and the world. The American people have never had a president as transparent as President Trump, who shares his thoughts with them in real time on all the important issues of the day.”It is unclear how much of the feed is written or posted by Trump himself, by his team or a combination of both.Natalie Harp, an aide to US president Donald Trump, shows a video of the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an Ice agent in Minneapolis, during an interview with New York Times journalists in Washington in January. Photograph: Doug Mills/The New York Times