“This is clearly a fake photo,” a White House official told The Daily Beast earlier this week. The statement came after days of online speculation about an image that appeared to show President Donald Trump kissing his executive assistant, Natalie Harp, on his golf course in Ireland.
The image of Trump and Harp does not survive a close inspection. Snopes reported that the clearest version of the image was watermarked as having been edited with artificial intelligence tools. Harp’s hand in the image has six fingers.
Debunking a claim when a falsehood spreads so quickly is already a challenge. Asking people to question what they have just seen with their own eyes is even harder.
But Harp’s close relationship with Trump has been widely reported in recent weeks, including reverential letters, in which she calls him her “Guardian and Protector in this Life,” and his $45,000 gift to her and two other aides. That was all the fuel the fake image needed to spread like wildfire. Its existence was consequential enough that it merited an official denial from the White House.
No one in American politics has done more than Trump to make fake imagery a routine tool of political communication — and now, fittingly, it has been turned back on him.
In fact, the pattern is familiar. Just days before this story went viral, on Aug. 30, Trump posted an AI-generated video of explosions on Iran’s Kharg Islands with the caption “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens!!! President DJT.”
“There was no other evidence that the Iranian energy hub was under attack,” Reuters wrote, “It was not clear if Trump’s post was a threat to Kharg Island — or if an attack was taking place.” Eventually, the Defense Department had to comment and clarified that the United States had not struck the islands.
A week later, Trump spent his Sunday going on a 37-post streak that included an AI image of himself on horseback next to George Washington and an AI image of longtime critic Robert De Niro holding a shirt that said “Trump Is My President.” Unlike the Kharg example, nobody thinks Trump is riding beside Washington. But it’s still a stunning habit for the most powerful person in the country.
As experts warn of the threat of using AI for political purposes, the president himself is going all in on the approach.
Of course, the spread of viral misinformation and disinformation online did not begin with generative AI. When I worked on Hillary Clinton’s digital team back in 2016, we spent that cycle running against an incredibly toxic online information ecosystem. Viral claims, pushed by Trump supporters, that Democrats were running a pedophile ring out of a local Washington, D.C., pizza joint later led a man to enter the business and fire a rifle.
But those sorts of claims, though amplified by social media, were made in a system already built to fact-check them, at least for those who prioritized the truth. AI fakes work on a deeper level. Debunking a claim when a falsehood spreads so quickly is already a challenge. Asking people to question what they have just seen with their own eyes is even harder.
Joe Biden’s administration was cautious about its embrace of AI, with the former president’s 2024 re-election campaign explicitly forbidding the use of deepfakes. Trump has gone in almost the exact opposite direction, making AI slop imagery a routine feature of his public communications. As experts warn of the threat of using AI for political purposes, the president himself is going all in on the approach and kicking off an inevitable race to the bottom in the process.
After all, whether the Harp story or the next one that comes around, media outlets can publish fact-checks, the White House can offer denials and social media users can try to correct one another. But a meaningful number of Americans will never unsee what they saw with their own eyes or read the debunking hours or days later. Trump has set the rules of the game on generative AI in our modern politics. At least for this round, he is losing. The rules need to change sooner rather than later. Maybe they finally will as more of the politicians who weaponize AI slop inevitably get burned by it themselves — and Trump has volunteered to go first.
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