How Generative A.I. Complements the MAGA Style

New York Times

13-03-2025

Right up front, and only once, let us acknowledge that everything about the 'Trump Gaza' A.I. video is insane: the proposal on which it is based, to resettle the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip and turn the area into a resort property; its content, which includes bearded belly dancers, an Elon Musk look-alike dancing on the beach and a golden statue of President Trump; and the fact that the president posted it, without comment, on a website called Truth Social. It's all absurd and awful. That is probably the point, if a concept as antiquated as intent applies to the new genre of computerized irony this video represents.
I doubt anyone involved in its production and dissemination believes it describes a viable plan for the future. Nevertheless, it expresses the perspective of a certain subset of Americans — not how they imagine the Gaza of tomorrow but how they understand the internet of today. What we have here is the MAGA aesthetic distilled: political expression not as a way to persuade people or even convey ideas but as social and cultural posturing.
There is also a song. Generated by A.I. in a style I would call in-flight techno, its lyrics begin, 'Donald's coming to set you free/bringing the light for all to see/no more troubles, no more fear/Trump Gaza is finally here.' This opening plays over shots of ruined city streets, where masked warriors with assault rifles alternately menace and care for children as civilians crouch in the rubble. GAZA 2025, the supertitles read. WHAT'S NEXT?
The rubble remains, but at this point the foggy skies clear up to reveal construction cranes in the distance. A shot of soldiers passing through an archway cuts to a woman and two children walking through the mouth of a cave toward a beach. Modern skyscrapers fill the horizon, followed by a drum break synced to a series of quick cuts: golden sands lapped by cerulean water, mixed-use retail on streets lined with late-model Teslas, more kids running out of another cave to another beach.
A man who looks like Musk, only 20 years younger and better rested, eats hummus before another cut to belly dancers with large breasts, shapely hips and full beards. This jarring sequence brings us to the chorus: 'Trump Gaza, shining bright/golden future, a brand-new light/feast and dance, the deed is done/Trump Gaza, No. 1.'
As the chorus repeats, we enter the 'after' portion of the spot. A child walks down a shining boulevard, holding a Mylar balloon shaped like the president's head. The president himself chats up a younger woman in a casino. Money falls from the sky. The aforementioned golden statue stands at the center of a busy roundabout, and Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drink cocktails with their shirts off by a pool. The whole thing is prime generative A.I. It's competently hacky, more technically proficient than what most people could produce, but also deranged in the Patrick Bateman style, as though an automaton had decided what humans like by watching thousands of commercials — which is, of course, exactly what happened.
Given how recently generative A.I. developed, it's remarkable how fast its aesthetic hallmarks have become recognizable: high-contrast textures, perceptibly diffuse lighting, forced-perspective shots in which people walk down city streets or through arched openings. It's not what dreams look like so much as a visual rendering of a dream's description, complete with mild failures of object permanence and the sense that we have seen it all before, although it didn't look like that.
As soon as this visual style became familiar, it seemed to become the dominant aesthetic of the pro-Trump internet. With the possible exception of venture capitalists, the demographic that appears to have embraced A.I. most enthusiastically is MAGA meme accounts, possibly because the people who have most loudly rejected it — graphic designers, journalists, photographers, filmmakers, musicians, teachers — are archetypal liberals. In the reactive logic of the MAGA rank and file, A.I. is good because the right people hate it.
This dynamic has produced a culture of computer-generated irony with peculiar characteristics. It is not the stable irony of a Jonathan Swift or a Stephen Colbert, in which the audience can rely on the ironist to say the opposite of what he means. Instead it is an unstable irony that leaves its real meaning ambiguous or at least plausibly deniable. President Trump himself popularized this approach by 'telling it like it is' in a way that consistently disregards precision if not accuracy, speaking in a hyperbolic style that his followers understand to be not literal but also gospel truth. The Trump Gaza video is ironic in this slippery sense of the word. It's the irony of saying more than you mean (literal golden idol of Trump), or saying what you mean in a way no one could call serious (the twice-stereotyped belly dancers), or calling attention to your leader's weak points as a gesture of unconditional loyalty (gold-leaf everything).
This is the irony that means figuratively the same thing it says literally, but in some different way that is never explained — the irony of the man who calls his wife fat and then complains she can't take a joke. Solo Avital and Ariel Vromen, the Los Angeles-based Israeli producers who generated Trump Gaza, neatly captured this rhetorical position when they told NBC that their video was satire but also not necessarily critical of Trump's proposal. In other words, unstable irony has given them a way to agree with the president even though they know he is wrong.
Ethnically cleansing Gaza in order to develop it as a resort property may be the dumbest and most venal idea Trump has ever had. That's the point. It's not that the denizens of the MAGA internet fail to realize such an idea is bad; it's that they're keenly aware that other people think they don't realize it's bad, so they play into that perception in order to become knowing. It's punk rock, kitsch, trolling: the art of making something so stupid that other members of your subculture experience it as smart. If it seems calculated to alienate people who don't already agree with it, that's because one of its functions is to emphasize that their support is no longer necessary.
In these early days of Trump's second term, the basic rhetorical strategy of trolling — not trying to persuade so much as trying to make what you say the subject of the biggest possible argument — seems to have escaped the internet and infected areas of life previously regarded as more important. A few days before the president posted the Trump Gaza video, Musk told the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference that 'I am become meme.' He was dressed in a leather jacket, chunky black sunglasses and a gold chain, apparently in homage to an A.I.-generated image of him that has become widespread on X. 'There's living the dream, and there's living the meme,' he said. 'And that's pretty much what's happening, you know?'
We do increasingly seem to be living the meme, even if 'dream' is not quite the word for that experience. As of this writing, the team Musk has labeled the Department of Government Efficiency — or DOGE, named for a meme — has persuaded the Trump administration to cut more than 80 percent of contracts administered through U.S.A.I.D. The more the reactive logic of posting intersects with policy, and the more that policy functions as signifier rather than plan, derived from webs of association rather than chains of events — that is, the more governance looks like slop — the more difficult it becomes to say who or what is actually in charge. There are people behind these ideas, but their role seems closer to distribution than production. More and more, it feels as if the computer came up with it.