There was a time in the not-too-distant past when you’d only encounter images of the president hanging with aliens at the checkout counter, tucked between Harlequin romance novels and issues of TV Guide. And you didn’t have to think too hard about what was going on because (a) pretty much everybody knew that the Weekly World News was not fact-based journalism and (b) there were headlines like “Hillary Clinton Adopts Alien Baby” or “Obama Appoints Martian Ambassador!”

Now it’s like we’re all living in the dream of a ’90s kid who stayed up too late drinking Fruitopia and reading Mom’s trashy “newspaper,” then conked out with The X Files running in the background. Tabloid king Donald Trump is the president of the United States. And he just casually dropped an image of himself walking through Area 51 with a totally nude, surprisingly jacked alien in handcuffs, with no explanation:

Why did Trump post this caption-free, AI-generated image to Truth Social on Sunday night? That may be something only the president and his “human printer” Natalie Harp know for sure. But I have some theories.

1. Aliens are real, and Trump is alerting us via inscrutable memes.

On May 8, the Defense Department released a tranche of documents related to UFOs at Trump’s direction. Nine days later, the president posted this photo of........

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