While you were out enjoying the Labor Day weekend, the president of the United States, apparently having nothing better to do, went on a 10-hour posting spree on his Truth Social account. What follows is a list of some of the dozens of AI memes he put online last Sunday. See if you can figure out which ones he posted and which ones I made up:
A video of himself changing “New Mexico” on a state road sign to “New America”; a picture of the moon with the words “The Moon is Ours!”; a video of himself blowing up planet Earth; a video of himself walking through Washington, D.C., with a glow-eyed robot army and the text, “They Will Never Sleep Again”; a video of himself replacing the word “Taco” on a Taco Bell logo with the word “Burger”; an image of himself in the Oval Office in front of a computer, with text stating that he “made Hundreds of Billions of Dollars on Stocks, and many other type Holdings, for the USA”; a video depicting massive explosions on an island with the words, “Bye bye, Kharg!”; an image of himself with the body and costume of the late Hulk Hogan, holding an American flag and wearing a MAGA headband; an image of himself sitting next to President George Washington in the Oval Office; an image of himself riding next to President George Washington on horseback; an image of Robert De Niro holding a shirt that reads, “Trump is my president”; an orange map of Iran altered to the shape of his profile; a heroic image of himself with the text, “Greatest President Ever!”
Give up? As a matter of fact, Trump posted all the above posts except for the one with him changing the Taco Bell logo, which I made up — but which could easily be true by the time you read this.
The Sunday fantasy spree followed a real-world spree last week wherein Trump got peeved and unilaterally decided he had the right to change the centuries-old Indigenous name of Lake Ontario to Lake America. He did so because Canada refused to let the United States dictate what other countries it could trade with and declined demands to no longer require the French language to be included on packaging. (It should be noted that Google Maps and Apple Maps quickly bent the knee to Trump’s non-binding whim — no doubt at their tech overlords’ orders — and changed the name on their apps to Lake America. MapQuest was still holding the line for Lake Ontario as I write this.)
At any rate, this week I fully expect Trump to change “French toast” to “American toast,” demand that “Canadian bacon” be changed to just “bacon,” and outlaw the use of the word “eh.” No word yet on Trump’s plans for Belgian waffles or Tex-Mex cuisine, though I’m hearing that city leaders in my hometown of Mexico, Missouri, are getting nervous.
So let’s review: Despite the fact that the country is in a “war” with no end in sight and running out of missiles, that oil and gas and food prices are skyrocketing, that grocery stores and fast-food joints are soon going to be flooded with off-brand ground beef from God knows where, that mortgage rates are at a 19-year high, that American citizens and immigrants with legal papers are being swept up in mass immigration arrests by masked rent-a-cops and detained in private prisons, that national parks are becoming corporate industrial sites, and that we’re slaughtering wild horses and endangered wolves — the president of the United States is consumed with changing the name of a lake, building a billion-dollar triumphal arch with his name on it, redesigning a freakin’ golf course, and posting lunatic AI memes of himself.
I used to think that maybe Trump was intentionally using actions like these as distractions while he and his family and friends destroyed our democratic institutions and engineered the wealth transfer from the American people to the billionaire oligarchs who run our economy and control our media. But I think Trump is now just the stooge — a useful, easily manipulated idiot with the attention span and self-control of a six-year-old, a frontman whose sole purpose is to keep progressives outraged and the MAGA faithful entertained — and both groups diverted from the wizards behind the curtain. How much longer can it work? We’ll find out in November.
