Propaganda, AI Fakes, and MAGA’s Totalitarian Kitsch
Why are so many top Republicans sharing fake images following Hurricane Helene?
1. Fake Art
A young child wearing a life preserver holds a puppy as rain streaks down her face and mats her hair. Both figures appear to be drenched as they sit in a boat surrounded by flat muddy water, the surface disturbed by raindrops. Out of focus in the background is another boat with several undistinguishable figures. “This picture has been seared into my mind,” Amy Kremer, a National Committeewoman for the Republican National Committee and cofounder of Women for Trump wrote in a post sharing the image on X. “My heart hurts 💔😭”
There’s only one problem: The image isn’t real.
While at first glance this picture might seem like just another entry in a gallery of AI slop that has come to define the MAGA aesthetic, it is being used by top Republicans as part of a larger strategy (I would call it a conspiracy but it doesn’t seem to be particularly secret) to attack the Biden administration’s response to Hurricane Helene.
“Kamala evacuated the Haitian migrants from Haiti but not the American children from North Carolina,” wrote former Trump adviser Stephen Miller in a quote-tweet with the image. He deleted that post, but the sentiment lives on among his vast following. “So sad,” wrote Laura Loomer, in response to someone sharing the image with the caption “Our government has failed us again.” Loomer shared the image—and other misinformation—on X while pushing to rename the unfolding tragedy “Hurricane Kamala.” Clay Travis, sports-journalist turned Trump sycophant, who recently had an exclusive interview with the former president, retweeted a Newsmax talk-show host who suggested the “photographer” of the image would get a Pulitzer if a Republican had been president.
These are not innocent mistakes. Anyone looking closely at the image would spot clues that it’s a fake. The inconsistencies range from the texture of the puppy’s fur, to the tears running down the girl’s face, to her cartoonish expression, and the compromised design integrity of the life-preserver she’s wearing. There are even more red flags in the background figures. But it doesn’t matter how obviously wrong or ridiculous an image may seem when people—especially the elderly who are more likely to have difficulty with their vision—scroll past it on a 3-inch screen. And why wouldn’t they trust it to be real when someone as serious as Stephen Miller—one of the top advisers in Trump’s White House!—shared it?
2. All of This Has Happened Before
The use of faked imagery is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. Political AI memes are just the most recent addition to the historical pantheon of kitsch used for propaganda. Sometimes authoritarian movements use faked imagery to trick the masses. But even if the fakes aren’t good enough to fool people, they can serve a purpose.
The image of the girl with the puppy is now accompanied by a community note on X which explains that the image is AI-generated and not real. Yet to many people, that seems to matter not at all. There are many many comments and quote-tweeted versions of people saying: So what?
“Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter. . . . I’m leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now,” the RNC’s Kremer wrote in a reply to her post with the image. (She was then hit with yet another community note clarifying again it is not a photograph at all and totally fake.)
“I don’t even car [sic] if it’s AI, it’s still accurate!!!” reads one quote tweet from someone with “Think for yourself!” as their display name. “[The Community note] says this is AI. In this case, I don’t care. We should look out for our own (Americans) before the rest of the world and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there was a girl fitting the description that wasn’t lucky enough to make it to a photographer for such an image,” reads another. “Yes this is ai generated…However it is still an accurate depiction of what people in the southeast have endured! All while Kamala was in California at a f*cking fundraiser!!” You get the point.
Where do these people get the idea that reality doesn’t matter? Possibly from JD Vance, who justified his Haitians-eating-your-pets lie by saying, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
What differentiates this instance of AI usage from the seemingly endless stream of memes spreading misinformation, or basic racist nonsense, or praise of Trump, or mockery of Harris, is that it’s emotional manipulation concerning an ongoing humanitarian crisis. It’s one thing to spread propaganda after the fact. It’s another to do it while the government and volunteer organizations are actively working to save lives.
3. The Power of the Image
In his 1961 book The Image, Daniel Boorstin opens by observing that “[W]e have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology, and our progress to create the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life.”
Vance and his online cronies want to continue this American tradition of reality denial. It doesn’t matter how good things are, or how well Biden and Harris are actually performing, every crisis is an opportunity to lie and to claim that Trump is the only one who can save Real Americans from these lies.
This cycle is not new and history has shown us what happens when charismatic leaders dictate the terms of reality.
Before computer servers were burning gigawatts of power to vomit up the cheapest-looking hyper-realistic images ever created in service of the stupidest despot of all time, there were the Italians. Their special blend of fascist propaganda contained multitudes.
“At once revolutionary and reactionary, avant-garde and return-to-order, Fascism thrived on cultural paradox,” Ara H. Merjian writes in Art in America. “Innovations in photomontage, exhibition design, cinema, architecture, painting, and sculpture all proved vital weapons in the Fascist arsenal.”
Mussolini’s regime used this range of media to recruit and entice artists to work for the Fascist Nationalism agenda. “Cultural production—or more precisely, an over-production of images, symbols, and spectacles” Merjian writes, “helped to smooth over the contradictions of Fascism’s ‘third way’ into a more fruitful paradox.”
The American right wing’s use of AI is the modern-day manifestation of this dichotomy—only Trump has eschewed the creative class and instead embraced Silicon Valley’s worst sophists to do the artistic heavy-lifting for him. And nothing has done more to reveal the political right’s resentment of the creative class than artificial intelligence and the sudden ability of anyone to churn out kitsch and “Chadify” pictures of Trump and JD Vance.
What a world.
There are other ironies.
“Avant-garde and kitsch live in a symbiotic relationship. . . . [F]ascism is always both: avant-garde and kitsch, and it’s difficult to fully divorce one side from the other,” John Ganz writes. “The avant-garde abstraction into attractive notions like ‘power’ as such obscures just how ugly and stupid power really looks like in practice.”
It’s tempting to dismiss the Trump movement’s propaganda as stupidity, precisely because it is kitsch. That would be a mistake. Because beneath the kitsch is something sinister.
Look back at the specifics of the original image of the girl in the hurricane and the story Trump’s loyalists are using it to tell. Compare that with this propaganda poster from Germany in April 1933, which declared:
German, you were at the front. You became poor during the post-war period. Your wife and children went hungry. The Jew fattened himself safely behind the lines and grew rich during the years of inflation and misery. Today he carouses and revels in wine bars and night clubs. You are the honest and poor serf, the Jew is the lying and rich lord. German businesses were destroyed by the Jews . . . German children were tortured and defiled by Jewish sadists.
Today’s MAGA rhetoric is shockingly similar. After Helene hit North Carolina, Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted, “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” She shared this sentiment alongside another tweet with an image overlaying the path of the hurricane with a map of election results.
Who is the “they”? Maybe it’s Democrats. Or liberals. Or the Jews. Whatever the case she is clearly talking about the Other. Other people can control the weather. Real Americans, evidently, lack such technological sophistication.
Another common sentiment shared with the image of the girl is the federal funding conspiracy that Tim and Sam broke down on YouTube over the weekend. “This may be an AI photo, but it sure gets the point across. $750 for Americans who have been devastated, but billions and millions for foreign countries. The choice at the ballot box is literally America First or America Last,” wrote another X-user with #TRUMP2024 in their bio.
“Each of us individually provides the market and the demand for the illusions which flood our experience,” Boorstin wrote, before detailing a list of uniquely American and paradoxical expectations. “We are ruled by extravagant expectations,” he observed:
Of our power to shape the world. Of our ability to create events when there are none, to make heroes when they don’t exist, to be somewhere else when we haven’t left home. Of our ability to make art forms suit our convenience . . . to fabricate national purposes when we lack them, to pursue these purposes after we have fabricated them.
By harboring, nourishing, and ever enlarging our extravagant expectations we create the demand for the illusions with which we deceive ourselves. And which we pay others to make to deceive us.
That was in 1961, but the same ravenous appetite fueled Trump’s rise to power. And he exploits it by giving the people what they want: more.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”
AI has increased the totalitarian’s ability to shred the fabric of shared reality. Which is why it’s one of the few technologies that MAGA has embraced.
Hannah Yoest, that was masterful. This deliberate emotional manipulation is searingly effective, and sets the hook in so deep it’s very resistant to reason or refutation. My best friend has fallen for it line and sinker. It makes me so furious I can barely talk to her.
Before you can get people to use their brains, you first need to get them to breathe and be calm.
Most trump supporters seem addicted to adrenaline and rage. They don't sort the truth from the lies because they are too busy enjoying the rush their outrage gives them.