When politics turns to parody: The age of mockery and AI in Washington
The White House, once a symbol of gravitas, increasingly feels like a stage for digital theatre, where shock replaces substance and spectacle substitutes for policy
When the president of the United States shares an AI-generated video of himself, crowned and soaring through the skies as "King Trump," dumping excrement on protesters, it's hard to tell whether to laugh, recoil, or simply accept it as the new normal.
The once solemn theatre of American politics has now fully morphed into something resembling internet satire - a blend of performance, provocation, and pixelated absurdity.
As The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote in her recent piece, Trump's weekend post - an AI-generated spectacle of self-coronation and public humiliation - "inadvertently captured his approach to governing."
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What was once shocking is now almost predictable: the blending of statecraft with meme culture, governance with mockery.
The video, which depicted the president in a fighter jet emblazoned with "King Trump" unleashing faeces on "No Kings" protesters, drew outrage and disbelief in equal measure. Yet, instead of condemnation from his political allies, House Speaker Mike Johnson defended the act as "satire", saying, "He is using satire to make a point. He is not calling for the murder of his political opponents."
The irony, of course, is that no one can quite decipher what that "point" is anymore.
Amplifying it on social media, the White House communications director Steven Cheung gleefully wrote that the president was defecating "all over these No Kings losers!"
In Trump's America, meaning itself has become slippery - buried beneath the layers of AI filters, memes, and trolling. The White House, once a symbol of gravitas, increasingly feels like a stage for digital theatre, where shock replaces substance and spectacle substitutes for policy.
Goldberg observes that this is not simply about vulgarity; it's about degradation as an aesthetic and political impulse.
Last week, when HuffPost asked the White House who chose Hungary as the site of an upcoming meeting between Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, responded, "Your mom did."
From the White House's bizarre redesigns to the administration's gleeful taunting of journalists with juvenile retorts like "Your mom did," there's a deliberate cheapening of political discourse. A kind of nihilistic glee fuels the chaos, where even desecration becomes a form of power.
What makes this moment uniquely unsettling is that the tools of unseriousness - AI, irony, and social media virality - are no longer the weapons of the powerless mocking the powerful. They are the tools of the powerful. Trump and his circle wield them masterfully, turning every controversy into content, every outrage into engagement.
The AI video, in that sense, is a metaphor for a broader transformation. The boundaries between propaganda, humour, and governance have collapsed.
A president can now rule and ridicule at the same time, and the country must parse policy through the noise of memes.
It is, as Goldberg suggests, the politics of defilement: an era where the spectacle of decay is not a symptom but a strategy. The question is no longer how low political discourse can sink, but whether it can rise again from beneath the digital sludge that now defines it.
