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........

© The Irish Times