SCIENCE
“Trump’s Team Posts AI Portraits of Him – Here’s Why Everyone’s Clicking!”
Here he is, depicted at six months in office, chiseled and brawny, as mighty as the very nation. Here he is as a Star Wars Jedi wielding a patriot-red lightsaber, rescuing our galaxy from the forces of evil. Here he is taking over Gaza, transforming the strip into a luxury resort complete with a golden effigy of himself.
You can be anything, perhaps you were told growing up. Doctor. Astronaut. Maybe, one day, the president. But even the chief executive of the United States, the free world’s leader, frames himself as something more epic — as someone not entirely himself.
On the social media accounts of Donald Trump and his second-term administration, a new official image of the president is emerging bit by bit: one generated artificially.
A sign of the times, certainly — when the appeal of reimagining yourself with artificial intelligence has trickled up from us everyday citizens. Bored with your selfies? Join a viral trend: There’s an image generator or a chatbot that can turn you into a Renaissance-style painting, a Studio Ghibli character or an action figure with box art and accessories.
Artificial imagery isn’t new for Trump, an early target of AI-generated simulacra who later exploited the technology during his 2024 campaign for the presidency. “It works both ways,” the Republican president said of AI-generated content at a news conference earlier this month. “If something happens that’s really bad, maybe I’ll have to just blame AI.”
The AI images of Trump posted by him and his team opt for the alternative — not deceptive but self-evident in their fictitiousness. Pope Francis dies, and Trump jokes to reporters that he’d like to be pope. A week later, he is, but in an AI-generated image that he posts, reposted by the White House. Trump likens himself to a king in a Truth Social post in February, and AI makes him one in an X post by the White House less than an hour later.
The artifice arrives in Trump’s usual style — brassy, unabashed, attention-grabbing — and squares with his social media team’s heavy meme posting, which it has promised to continue. The administration’s official social media accounts have grown by more than 16 million new followers across platforms since Inauguration Day, a White House official told NBC News.
The White House recognizes the appeal. In July, it posted to its X account: “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say we can’t post banger memes.” Attached to the post, a photo of a sign on the White House lawn parodying the naysayers: “oMg, diD tHe wHiTE hOuSE reALLy PosT tHis?”
Behind the commander in chief’s desire to craft an AI self — not itself uncommon — an infantry of official communications channels stands at his ready. And we, the people, can’t help but tune in.
Like so much on the internet these days, Trump’s AI portraits are primed for people to react, says Evan Cornog, a political historian and author of “The Power and the Story: How the Crafted Presidential Narrative Has Determined Political Success from George Washington to George W. Bush.”
“By the time you’ve seen it, you’ve understood it. And that’s, of course, the efficacy,” Cornog said. “It requires no effort, either for the person generating it, but particularly for the person consuming it.”
The expressive power of political imagery, regardless of the truth of its message, has long been understood by politicians and their detractors.
President William Henry Harrison’s log cabin and hard cider campaign symbols, representing him as a “man of the people,” helped him win the election of 1840. Thirty years later, political cartoonist Thomas Nast would turn public opinion against William Marcy “Boss” Tweed with his scathing portrayals of the politician, whom he depicted satirically overweight from greed. “Let’s stop those damned pictures!” Tweed once said, or so the story goes.
The decades since witnessed the birth of photo, film, TV, the internet, computer printers, image-editing software and digital screens that shrank until they could fit in our pockets, making it increasingly easy to create and disseminate — and manipulate — imagery.
By contrast, today’s generative AI technology offers greater realism, functionality and accessibility to content creation than ever before, says AI expert Henry Ajder. Not to mention, of course, a capacity for endless automated possibility.
Past presidents “had to actually have fought in a war to run as a war hero,” Cornog says. Now, they can just generate an image of themselves as one. On a horse — or no, a battlefield. With an American flag waving behind him and an eagle soaring.
The AI images of Trump shared by him and his administration chase a similarly heroic vision of the president. Potency — his and the country’s — is a consistent theme, Cornog added.
Indeed, generative AI allows for an exposure of perhaps uncomfortably intimate inner worlds as people use such technology to illustrate and communicate their “fantasy lives” or cartoonish versions of themselves, says Mitchell Stephens, author of “The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word.”
But it can just as easily fulfill an inverse desire: to depict or reinforce a subjective concept of reality.
“Quite a lot of people are sharing AI-generated content, which is clearly fake but is almost seen as a revelatory kind of representation of someone,” Ajder said. This content feeds a mentality that mutters, “We all know they’re really like this.”
“And so, even if people know it’s fake,” Ajder said, “they still see it as kind of reflecting and satisfying a kind of truth — their truth about what the world is like.”
The lack of subtlety in Trump’s AI images of himself helps explain their consistent virality.
Commenters can be found lamenting the demise of presidential decorum (“I never thought I’d see the day when the White House is just a joke. This is so embarrassing.”) or relishing those very reactions (“Watching the left explode over this has been a treat.”).
Other responses, even from the president’s base, remain unconvinced (as one X user griped under the White House post of Trump as pope: “I voted for you, but this is weird and creepy. More mass deportations and less of whatever this is.”).
But that is tradition for Trump, who finds no trouble cashing the currency of our attention economy: Whether you cracked a smile or clutched your pearls, he still made you look.
“In his first administration, he used Twitter in a way no president had,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project, an organization that facilitates the transition between presidents. “What they do in this administration is taking it further, as you’ve had an increase in what can be done online.” Or, as one Reddit user referred to the president: “Troll in Chief.”
Does Trump really think he should be pope? Does the White House really think him a king? Accuracy isn’t the point, not for a man who frequently arbitrates what counts as truth. Trump’s use of AI sticks to a familiar recipe for bait: crude comedy sprinkled with wishful thinking.
“It’s fine,” Trump said in May, when asked whether the AI-generated post of him as pope diminished the substance of the official White House account.
“Have to have a little fun, don’t you?”
More than 3,000 passwords belonging to civil servants have been exposed online since the beginning of 2024, according to new research, as experts warn it could pose a “serious risk” to national security.
A report by NordPass, using the threat exposure management platform NordStellar, found 3,014 passwords belonging to British civil servants have been leaked in the deep web – which encompasses parts of the internet that are not typically indexed by search engines– and the dark web, a small, encrypted part of the deep web that requires specific software to access and is often associated with cybercrime.
Four local authorities were named in the report as having passwords exposed online: Aberdeen City Council had 538 in total, while Lancashire County Council had 38, Newham Council had 73 and Southwark Council had 42 leaked on the dark and deep web.
It comes after The Independent revealed that hundreds of passwords and email addresses linked to UK government institutions were posted on the dark web in the last year, highlighting a major threat to UK cyber and national security. Among the most affected government departments are the Ministry of Justice with 195 exposed passwords, the Ministry of Defence (111), and Department of Work and Pensions (122).
A cyber security expert warned that the exposed sensitive data of civil servants was particularly dangerous as it could pose serious risks to the UK’s strategic interests.
Karolis Arbačiauskas, head of product at NordPass, said: “Exposure of sensitive data, including passwords, of civil servants is particularly dangerous. Compromised passwords can affect not only organisations and their employees but also large numbers of citizens. Moreover, such incidents may also pose serious risks to a country’s strategic interests.”
The report added that while the “vast majority of passwords exposed were those of employees working in regional level institutions,” the number of leaked passwords did not necessarily reflect the strength of an organisation’s internal security.
“These figures are often influenced by external factors,” said Mr Arbačiauskas. “Larger organisations, with more employees, naturally have a bigger digital footprint, which statistically increases the likelihood of credentials being exposed in a breach. In many cases, a single malware infection on an employee’s personal device or the compromise of a popular third-party website can expose dozens of accounts. Furthermore, the majority of leaks originate from external sites where employees registered using their work email addresses.”
He encouraged the practice of setting up an organisation-wide password policy, never reusing passwords, and using multi-factor authentication.
“If these passwords were not changed after their appearance on the dark web and multi-factor authentication (MFA) is not enabled, attackers could potentially access the email accounts and other sensitive information of these civil servants,” he said. “Moreover, we found hundreds of thousands of email addresses with other exposed data like names, last names, phone numbers, autofills, and cookies. This data can be exploited for phishing attacks and pose significant risks.”
It comes as the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said on Tuesday that a “significant threat” posed by Chinese and Russian hackers had contributed to a record number of serious online attacks. A number of UK businesses, such as M&S, Jaguar Land Rover and Co-op have been hit by cyber attacks this year, crippling their operations and costing the firms billions.
In the year to the end of August, NCSC provided support in 429 cases, of which 204 were deemed “nationally significant incidents” – an increase from 89 in the previous 12 months. Of those, 18 were categorised as “highly significant”, meaning they had a serious impact on government, essential services, the economy or a large proportion of the UK population.
A spokesperson for Newham Council said: “It is an unfortunate reality that organisations like Newham Council will always be a target for criminals. Newham Council takes cybersecurity extremely seriously and have a number of robust measures in place to reduce risk. We regularly provide training and guidance to our staff making them aware of the risks and effective technical controls to reduce specific cyber risks. We do not comment on specific details of our cyber security controls and policies.”
An Aberdeen City Council spokesperson said: “Aberdeen City Council regularly reviews lists of compromised credentials via the National Cyber Security Centre and other official sources. These email/ password combinations are typically used to sign up on external sites or services rather than being compromised from the council’s tenant. Regardless of this all impacted account holders are contacted, and their passwords are reset as a matter of course.”
The Independent has approached Lancashire County Council, and Southwark Council for comment.
