The Desperation of Donald Trump’s Posts

Summer weekends in America are good for lots of things: baseball games, cookouts, farmers’ markets, sipping a bev next to a lake. Or, if you’re President Donald Trump: crashing out on social media in hopes of distracting the nation from nonstop coverage of his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump is an inveterate poster, known for his erratic style and late-night tirades. But over the weekend, as the world refused to move on from his administration’s bizarre handling of the Epstein files—which has led segments of his base to completely melt down—Trump went on a posting spree that was alarming, even by his own standards.

On Sunday alone, Trump posted 33 times on Truth Social, sending off 20 posts between 6:46 and 8:53 p.m. eastern. He demanded that the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians revert to their original names (the Redskins and Indians, respectively), and posted an AI-generated video of Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office set to the song “Y.M.C.A.,” by the Village People. Trump also shared a contextless, grainy video that looks like it was scraped from some viral social-media post. It includes no captions and features 25 stitched-together clips, set to music, of people doing wild or dangerous stunts: A woman appears to catch a charging cobra with her bare hands, a man does a forward flip from one moving skateboard to another, various people contort their bodies in strange ways, a dude stands on the footrests of a moving dirt bike.

Even some of Trump’s die-hard fans on Truth Social seemed caught off guard by the video, struggling to draw a connection between it and Trump’s politics. “Was expecting a video of you at the end!” one top commenter wrote. (A spokesperson for the White House did not answer my questions about why the commander in chief was posting an extreme-sports highlight reel on Sunday night.)

The bizarre video was immediately recognizable to me as the type of garbage that clogs the feeds of many people who still use Facebook, a platform that is filled with inscrutable slop posted by spammers and content farmers. By the early 2020s—before generative-AI images took over—Facebook had already transformed into a vast wasteland of low-quality memes, repurposed videos, and strange pages dedicated to clips like “Shelter Pit Bull Made His Bed Every Day Until a Family Adopted Him.” This type of content fits in a category that I have taken to calling “soft-brain scrolling.” It falls somewhere between probably harmless and not nutritious; it’s mostly low-quality algorithmic arbitrage that helps click farmers make a buck. Your confused relatives seem to love it.

That the account belonging to the president of the United States is now posting to the entire world like a Facebook Uncle, though, is a troubling sign. (It’s unclear if Trump does all of the direct publishing himself, though The Washington Post reported last month that aides have been surprised by messages posted to his account in the wee hours of the morning. In the past, he would reportedly dictate and edit his own tweets, down to the odd capitalization of specific words.) He’s exhibited milder forms of Facebook Uncle syndrome for years now—even in 2016, Trump would retweet white-supremacist accounts, angrily live-tweet Saturday Night Live, and publicly congratulate himself—but the behavior appears to be getting worse.

The best analogue for this moment may be Trump’s online raging after the January 6, 2021, insurrection. During this period, Trump was temporarily banned from mainstream platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. He launched Truth Social in 2022 and began making and sharing more extreme posts, including hundreds from accounts promoting QAnon conspiracy theories. In one day in 2022, he reportedly posted 50 separate times—in many cases about how the 2020 election was supposedly stolen. The tone this past weekend felt similar, with Trump posting an AI-generated image of officials from the Obama administration and former FBI Director James Comey in orange prison jumpsuits, arrayed in a Brady Bunch–style grid. The center of the image reads “The Shady Bunch.” Along the same lines, Trump also posted a caps-laden message to his followers last week, demanding that they move on from the Epstein “Hoax” and calling it “bullshit” from the “Lunatic Left.” He is lashing out, on the defensive, and seemingly unable, or at best unwilling, to control his screen time.

Trump has always loved to post, obviously, and even the generative-AI stuff isn’t new, exactly. Last year, during his presidential campaign, Trump fully embraced the technology as a propaganda tool, posting and reposting images of himself praying, Taylor Swift fans endorsing him en masse (that was before the real Taylor Swift endorsed his opponent), and AI Kamala Harris speaking in front of a hammer and sickle flag. As the Post reported in its article about Trump’s social-media use, in the first four and a half months of this term, Trump “posted to Truth Social over 2,200 times—more than three times the number of tweets he sent in the same period in 2017.”

Unlike the material we saw over the weekend, a lot of Trump’s posts during that period were clear political statements and directives. During Trump’s tariff vacillations, which caused markets to plummet, he posted on Truth Social that Americans should “BE COOL” and not become “PANICANS,” an invented term for people who expressed genuine concern that Trump was destroying the economy. (MAGA influencers tried and failed to make that one stick.) Trump also used his account to threaten world leaders. For instance, he lashed out at Colombian President Gustavo Petro over his attempts to block deportation flights. (Petro backed down.) In May, he used the account to admonish Russian President Vladimir Putin, suggesting that “if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia,” and that Putin was “playing with fire!” His posting in the lead-up to bombing Iran was another example of Trump forcing the world to hang on his every word; eventually, he announced the strike via Truth Social. In all cases, Trump was posting, however maniacally, from a position of power and demonstrating influence.

Not so recently. The week that preceded the Truth Social binge on Sunday may very well have been the most frustrating of Trump’s second term, not only because the Epstein scandal threatened to tear apart his MAGA coalition, but because Trump could not persuade the usual people to drop the story. As my colleagues Ashley Parker and Jonathan Lemire reported over the weekend, “the limits of his power over normal allies became evident” as Trump failed to get Rupert Murdoch or The Wall Street Journal’s editor in chief, Emma Tucker, to stop the paper from publishing a story about a lewd 50th-birthday letter that Trump allegedly sent to Epstein.

Trump had to deal with frustrations like these during his first term, when he was often checked and handled by career politicians and beset by press leaks from anonymous staffers, and faced constant backlash from the media and Silicon Valley. But Trump’s second term has been different. He’s surrounded mostly by true believers and sycophants and able to engage somewhat freely in various forms of government dismantling and corruption. Numerous media companies have bowed to Trump or appeared to soften their adversarial stance. At Trump’s inauguration, Silicon Valley’s most powerful executives stood behind him, offering a tacit show of support for his administration. The vibe had shifted in Trump’s favor, and he behaved with impunity. Yet the Epstein case has been a genuine hurdle. Republicans are seemingly desperate to make the story go away, so much so that Speaker Mike Johnson shut the House down early to avoid “political games” and block any potential votes calling for the release of files pertaining to Epstein.

One can tell a lot about how Trump feels about his own power and influence by the way he’s posting. There are multiple ways to interpret Trump’s weekend posts. The most basic is that Trump’s long-standing obsession with AI slop and memes—working in overdrive right now—is a useful propaganda tool. Before he needed a grassroots meme army to provide memes; now polished and bespoke Trump slop is always just a ChatGPT query away, no genuine enthusiasm required.

A second reading is to see Trump’s affinity for reposting fan art as Executive Cope. Here, the slop is a way for Trump to escape and imagine the world as he’d like it to be. In slop world, Trump is not embattled, getting screamed at by his supporters over what looks to them like a guilty cover-up on behalf of a pedophile. Instead, he’s arresting Obama. It’s pure fan fiction that depicts Trump having power in a moment when, perhaps, he feels somewhat powerless.

A third reading of Trump’s Truth Social posts—especially his reposting of strange viral Facebook garbage and angry culture-war stuff railing against “woke” sports-team names—suggests that these posts aren’t part of any kind of strategy or coping mechanism, but examples of a person who is addled and raging at things he feels he has no control over. For years, people have offered anecdotes that Trump behaves online like some isolated, elderly people who have been radicalized by their social-media feeds—in 2017, Stephen Colbert memorably likened Trump to America’s first racist grandpa. His recent posting certainly fits this template. And paired with some of Trump’s other cognitive stumbles—he seemingly forgot last week that he had appointed Fed Chair Jerome Powell—it all starts to feel more concerning.

In this context, Trump’s Truth Social page is little more than a rapid-response account that illustrates a world that doesn’t actually exist: one in which POTUS looks like a comic-book hero, is universally beloved, and exerts his executive authority to jail or silence anyone who disagrees with him. This sort of revenge fantasy would be sad coming from anyone. That it is coming from the president of the United States, a man obsessed with retribution, who presides over a government that is enthusiastically arresting and jailing immigrants in makeshift camps, is terrifying.

All of this points to what my colleague Tom Nichols noted almost exactly one year ago, when Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination: The president “is emotionally unwell.” In describing Trump’s speech that night, Nichols said that his long, often pointless digressions “were the ramblings of a man who has serious psychological problems. All of it was on display last night: rage, paranoia, pettiness, desolating selfishness.”

The same explanation could be applied perfectly to Trump’s Truth Social posts over the weekend. Trump called for Senator Adam Schiff to be prosecuted. He appeared pathologically aggrieved—spending part of his Saturday night posting a detailed infographic intended to debunk the supposed “Russia hoax” from an election that happened almost nine years ago. (Propaganda experts say this is an attempt by Trump and his administration to rewrite history.) He posted a fake mug shot of Obama. And, on Sunday morning, he pecked out a 103-word message congratulating himself on his first six months in office. Rage, paranoia, pettiness, and desolating selfishness: Trump appears consumed more and more by an online world that offers him the chance to live out the fantasy of the unilateral power and adulation that he craves.

Talking about Trump and social media is complicated because, unlike most users, Trump can post ridiculous things, transform news cycles, and force the world to react to his posts. But lately, his posts are not having the desired effect. It’s possible that what observers witnessed this weekend is a tipping point of sorts. Trump’s posts, instead of influencing reality, suggest that the president is retreating from it entirely.