The President Is Posting Fake Bombings and Threatening Allies

0:00Hey guys, welcome to Bullwork Takes. I am Andrew Egger, joined by my colleague, Catherine Rampell, to talk about a real tear the president has been on on social media. This has been, it's not news to anyone that Trump is a social media addict. This has been his greatest strength and his greatest weakness for a long time, for as long as he has been in politics, his addiction to Twitter, his addiction to mixing it up on the news of the day online, calling people names. The AI stuff, the AI stuff is newer. The president has been dabbling and then participating and now is perpetually overdosing. It kind of seems like on AI slop type content, he has been on a real tear this weekend into today's posted more than 100 times on truth social, including a number of just insane, bizarre AI generated clips. We're going to walk through a few of them for your edification and be musement. Before we do that, Catherine, are we crazy to see this as kind of like a new thing for

1:05the president? I mean, I know we've had moments like this here and there over the last year or so with Trump just sort of dabbling and deranged AI content, but were you surprised by the pace this weekend? It sometimes feels like he almost goes through these quasi-manic episodes. I mean, I don't mean that in any sort of like actual clinical sense. It's just like he goes through bursts of these postings. I remember when he did the dumping of poop AI slop video, I forget when that was- On the No Kings protesters, so during no Kings. Yes, yes. So he kind of goes through phases where he posts a lot of this poop for lack of a better word. And I don't exactly know what triggers it, but it feels a little bit like, you know how people talk about having the conversation with their parents or grandparents about taking the keys away. It feels like somebody needs to take like Chatchy BT away or Claude or whoever, like whatever

2:11software or aid, you know, it's Natalie or somebody else is feeding him all of this stuff, because it just, it really does feel like he's binging on all of this. Rather than, I don't know, governing or paying attention to happening what's, you know, what's happening in Treasury markets or anything else that he could quite more legitimately be spending his time on. Yeah, yeah. Let's get to some of these clips. Before we do that, let me just say if you're out there, if you're not subscribed to the channel, hope you will subscribe to the channel. It helps us out a lot, helps us get on other people's screens, helps us stay sticky on your screen, even if the gods of the YouTube algorithm decide to frown on us more than they have in the past. You want to keep seeing our stuff? Hope you'll subscribe to the channel. Okay, let's start with the post of these that made the most news, let's say. This is the president's post from yesterday of, of purportedly showing US strikes being carried out on Iran's oil facilities at Carg Island.

3:13Let's play that video here. So this is obviously AI Slop for anybody who has ever watched it, but the president did not suggest that it was AI Slop, he just tweeted out Carg Island being blown to smithereens, president DJT at a moment when the US was carrying out strikes on Iran. And the Pentagon had to get out there and walk that back, say, this was not a, this was not a real strike. We don't really know they didn't actually comment, they didn't say, we don't know what the president was up to with that post, but they did clarify not real footage of any real attack on Carg Island. There was no attack on Carg Island, but that's one. Any comment on that one or should we just go through these? Yeah, okay. My comment on this is that I go back and forth about whether it is worth drawing more attention to the crazy bullshit that Donald Trump tweets or posts or whatever, because it's like on the one hand, it's giving him the eyeballs that he wants, you know,

4:15like it's the distraction and like there's so many more serious things and that's the argument against drawing attention to this. But the argument for drawing attention to this is we don't know if Donald Trump himself can differentiate between this and reality. And that's what's a little bit terrifying here. Like when he says that this is an attack on Carg Island, does he know that it is not actually an attack on Carg Island and that this is this AI slop alternate reality that has been created for him? Like to what extent is he tethered to what is actually going on in his military? And I think that's what's significant here. Yeah, that is such a good point actually. And it's going to it's going to tee us up really well into a couple of these other clips because it kind of cuts both ways with AI. I mean, people use AI to joke around and to, you know, have silly brain rot stuff. And a couple of these, you know, I think we can safely say the president is participating in that way where these are some things, you know, Canada ducks walking around shooting machine guns with Trump wigs on, probably not a lot of various similitude in that one.

5:16There are other clips that we're going to get to or especially other screenshots we're going to get to in a minute here where it's exactly the opposite. It does seem like the president thinks he's sharing some real information in a way that is suspicious and sort of alarming. So let's just do that one first. Let's do the quote unquote fun ones. I mean, even they are insane and sort of awful. But there's a couple of clips related to the whole brujaha overlay Ontario, which Trump is trying to rename like America. Let's play those real quick back to back. What? This is the president. I mean, it is amusing. I will say that. Yeah. If it were not coming from the leader of the free world, I would say like, oh, look, this is funny. It's a bunch of geese carrying machine guns with Trump wigs, how hilarious. But again, you have to consider the source. And like the cost, obviously, of creating this big joke at the expense of our northern friends.

6:22Yeah. I mean, we've talked a lot about that. I don't want to get too into that just because I don't want to I don't want steam to start coming out of my ears again. We've done a lot of a lot of like yanking out our hair over the insane things Trump is doing to our relationship with Canada. Let's just play this second Lake Ontario clip just so you have a fuller picture of what the president's been up to this weekend. There you go. A little more. All right. Get that guy off the screen. I hadn't even watched that one through to know there was a second cut in here. I was just mourning mood. I was like, this is peaceful. Okay. So yeah, there you go. I mean, the president knows the president knows the president was not out there dancing. So this is not this is this is Trump posting Trump having fun version of the AI brain rot. Yeah. Look, it's it's silly if it were from any other source. If you were a random fan, you know, I'd be like, whatever, I don't want to get too up at arms over the fact that like he has a

7:27fan who's happy about this idiotic, you know, almost catastrophically diplomatically stupid thing that he has done. But fine, like that's a random fan. Again, coming from the leader of the free world, much more troubling. It's just like adding insult to insult to insult to injury for our Canadian friends here. And again, doesn't he have better things to be doing? I don't know, what is your reaction to this? Yeah, I think one thing to really again to drill home, this is all stuff he's been posting over the last couple of days in a string of more than 100 truth social posts that he has made. And it's just each individual one is so strange and weird and off-putting on the merits, especially that car guy lend one we mentioned a minute ago. But but also just the the bizarre stream of consciousness of putting it all together, you know, it's like all these different wacky AI things going in all sorts of different directions. That car guy lend clip, by the way, he tweets that out and then and again, not suggesting it's AI, just saying, here's

8:31car guy lend getting bombed by us. That's pretty awesome. Does he understand what is reality and what is not reality? And the 30 seconds after that, he tweets out a random no context, five second clip of him making some drive on one of his golf courses. So it's just like, I mean, you almost can't put a mental model on it because it's just so strange and bizarre as behavior. I mean, it's crazy stuff. There's one other post I wanted to highlight here and this is not a video. But I think this is sort of striking for a completely different reason. And that's this post which he made linking supposedly demonstrating a link between vaccines and autism by pointing at the omnis community. He says in 330 years, no published case has been explicitly documented with an unvaccinated omnis child with autism. It goes down to site this supposed study. I poked around on this a little bit. It's silly. This is this is the sort of sort of garbo infographic that these chat bots will spit out for you. It doesn't actually say anything about

9:36anything. It's just saying you can't find a documented omnis child who got vaccinated and later got autism anywhere in the medical literature. I don't know if that claim is true. Even if that claim were true, it would not actually do anything to demonstrate the consistently debunked supposed link between vaccines and autism. But again, this is just the president spitting out something that is flattering to his particular priors. He does believe there is such a thing as a connection between vaccine and autism. And apparently, like so many Americans, turning to chat bots to figure out how to, I don't know, hang some scientific sounding jargon and some professional looking graphic design to make those ideas seem to hang together better. Yeah, I have a couple of reaction to this. I think it's despicable, honestly. I think this is unlike the geese thing or whatever. I think this is not silly. I think people's lives are going to be cost by this. And I think it's particularly tone deaf for him to do this in the wake of the

10:38measles linked death in Pennsylvania, which appears to be one of them anyway, was a newborn infant in the Amish community. That's what the Atlantic reported recently. Having found apparently the parents of that child who said that the mother wall pregnant got measles as did the rest of their family and the child lived only something like a half hour. So the idea of posting this in the wake of that tragedy seemingly to justify the lack of vaccination in, well, in any community, but particularly in this community that just lost a child potentially because of the lack of that inoculation, I just think is really despicable. And I don't know how much more damage he's causing. The other thing that I would say is again, if this was your uncle or your grandfather or your mom who was posting all of this stuff on Facebook, you would change their Facebook password, right? Like

11:44you would say, this is destructive, this is embarrassing, this is maybe a sign of some other greater mental decline. I don't know. Whatever the case may be, we are taking the keys to Facebook and the fact that we cannot do this with the leader of the free world is much more consequential. I mean, it's it's still embarrassing, but it's much more consequential because you don't know how many of his followers or how many of our allies or how many of our adversaries are paying attention to all of this and we'll use it against him. We'll use it against Americans and Americans. We'll use it against themselves because maybe they'll decide, hey, our great president says that this is this is evidence somehow that my kid won't get autism if they don't get an MR vaccine. Meanwhile, there's a major measles outbreak. So I don't know. Everything about this is just gross to me. Yeah. Very said. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's it is so interesting. You bring up the the whole business of the who would be in a position to take away this guy's keys, right? This is sort of a long standing

12:46problem. It is it is one of the one of the many, many good and compelling reasons why one ought not elect such a person president in the first place, but that ship has sailed. Hey, stop right there. Are you enjoying this bulwark take? Well, look, I've got some great news for you. Bork was going on tour this fall for the good fight tour and tickets are available right now at the bulwark.com slash events. Sarah JVL to myself. We will be in Columbia, South Carolina on October 16th. Then Charlotte North Carolina on October 18th and then Atlanta, Georgia on October 20th. And while we're talking about Charlotte, I wanted to give a quick shout out to Noda Brewing for sending some beer. Our way. Look, Noda, thank you. Pumpkin ale. Gonna enjoy this one. Perfect for the October tour date and I cracked this not today. It's about 2 30 pm right now, but later and certainly when I'm on the tour with JVL Tim and Sarah, so check out the bulwark.com slash events to see me and some other bullock friends coming to your city and be sure to grab your tickets and coming out of this.

13:48So here we are in the present moment and one of the things that has been really remarkable in the wake of this posting binge has been the little flashes of insight that you get from the people around Trump that they aren't really sure exactly what's going on with it either, right? I mean, we should play this clip. This is this is Vice President JD Vance being asked specifically about that Carb Island clip. It's like, whoa, we're at war with, uh, we're at war with Iran. We're bombing them. The president is apparently spreading insane AI slop disinformation that we are attacking their oil facilities on Carb Island. What's going on with that? And you might hope the Vice President would have some kind of response ready to go for that. And instead, what he says is this. On Iran, the President tweeted some AI-generated video of bombing of Carb Island. Was that meant to be a warning or what was the messaging there? Why did the President tweet that? Well, you know, like the President likes to switch it up on social media a little bit. He would be the first to say he doesn't make an announcement about military actions on social media.

14:51But I think that he's sending a message to the Iranians. Look, we know that they continue to shoot a commercial shipping. We continue to have a lot of tools at our disposal to prevent them from doing so or at least cut down on them from doing so. And that's what the President is saying is, look, you guys are shooting at commercial shipping. You guys are behaving like a terrorist country. You've got to stop and there are going to be some thoughts on point. Yeah, so, you know, relatively polished politician JD Vance does a pretty good job blustering his way through the fact that there is no good answer to that question. He doesn't know why the President would post that. He sort of speculates, well, you know, he's a funny guy on social media. He does interesting things on there sometimes and then he pivots back to the normal administration talking points on the war. But even the Vice President and, you know, the other people at the top levels around him who in theory should be controlling the information that gets to the President, what he ought to be able to see and work on and make decisions based on, even they seem completely non-placed that like there's just this AI slop that gets to him and then he sends it out. Yeah, gets to him. He sends it out again. We don't know if he's differentiating

15:55between this and reality. It is interesting how the people around Trump have pivoted to some extent in talking about his garbage that he posts on social media. Like in Trump 1.0, there was a lot of, I didn't see the tweet, right? That was the standard response when Paul Ryan or whoever was asked about something grigis that the President posted. It was like, well, I don't want to have to deal with it. I guess JD Vance cannot claim that he's not following with baited breath every single key stroke on truth social. So maybe that's not an option to him. But instead, this time around, everybody's still pretending that this guy still has his marbles and that he's not tweeting out garbage that is again embarrassing and humiliating to the United States and insulting to our allies and potentially undermining our military strategy abroad, whatever. They just have to pretend none of those consequences are happening and then have to put some kind of veneer of

16:56rationality on it. And honestly, I admire JD Vance's performance there. I could not have done that. As you said, he did as well as one could, given these circumstances in pivoting to the talking points. I mean, a better response. I would admire him more if he actually stood up for himself and the national security interests of this country and maybe tried to take the iPhone away or whatever. He looks right into the camera and he says, 25th Amendment now. I would definitely admire him more than, but I'm not particularly expecting that outcome. So, I guess, once you've sold out, this is the best you can do. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is really crazy. I do worry. The output is one thing. You were talking about that before, the way that this kind of communication just continues to poison the information ecosystem continues to poison the brains of all the people around him. I am also

17:56just getting more and more alarmed about the president's own brain. I mean, his own inability to process and take in information that he does not want to hear. That's longstanding. We've talked so much in this second term, especially about this hermetically sealed information environment. He's created for himself where he just is surrounded by licks, spittles, and backpacks and people who are crawling over each other's bodies to be the ones to bring him good news and none of whom want to tell him any of the bad stuff. That's all bad enough. But when you add on top of that, the sick of fancy machine, like this greatest ever piece of technology for flattering somebody's priors and telling them exactly what they want to hear in the form of these AI chat bots. And I should say, I don't know for a fact that Donald Trump is out there, prompting Grock or prompting Claude himself in the Oval Office on his $20 enterprise subscription or whatever.

18:58But he gets the same thing because people are constantly sending him this stuff. And Natalie Harp is constantly showing him this stuff. And it comes to the same thing. It's like he is one shotting his own brain more and more with all these sort of slickly produced videos that are all about how he's the awesomeness guy ever and he's Jesus Christ and he's hanging out with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. And this is a guy who's already predisposed to believe all this sort of stuff about himself. I genuinely do think it is furthering. It is widening the gap between his own perception and any kind of actual reality. Yeah, that's an excellent point. So it's like it almost doesn't matter if he doesn't differentiate between what's what he's posting in reality. It's like there's some sort of impressionistic result of it. Like he doesn't need to believe in the details of the cargyle and fake strike or whatever the AI generated strike. It's like if he thinks that there's a universe where this would be celebrated, this is enough.

20:01And I like your differentiation between something that I kind of associate more with Trump 1.0 or even like the beginning of Trump 2.0, which is people filtering out the bad news and instead filtering in good fake news. They are directionally the same thing but one seems a lot worse. It's one thing if you have cabinet members and aids who are unwilling to show him bad polls for example or bad economic data. It's another thing when they're creating out of whole cloth with benefit of the AI tools that are now available. This alternate universe where there are these glowing portraits of him as Jesus Christ and as the Pope and whatever. Where there's this alternate reality where he is celebrated. It's not just that he's not being criticized and condemned.

21:01He is this in his mind. This like all powerful cult-like figure that a lot of his followers frankly would like him to be. But that he is I guess increasingly convincing himself of or his aids are or grok is or whatever else because they can supply the fabricated evidence to create that alternate reality. Yeah. When you hear him talk about it it is pretty clear. That is that's the universe he believes himself to be learning it. You know where we're in the golden age in America's the hottest country in the world and he's the greatest president of all time. I mean this is not it is spin to a certain extent. These things are narratives that he is trying desperately to get the country to continue to believe about him. But I don't think he's lying when he says those things. I think that is that is the sort of delusion that he has wrapped himself in. And that that's what those are the kinds of delusions he's been wrapping himself in for his entire his entire business career, his entire political career. But I think if you hooked him up to a lie detector and were like sir are you the greatest president of all time. He'd be like absolutely. Is

22:03it the golden age for America? Sure is. Is America the hottest country on earth? Well obviously it's the hottest country on earth. Mohamed Ben Salman told me so himself. You know so and again I just see the geese video. Yeah and yeah and it just he just swims in a bath of all of this stuff all the time whether it's the whether it's the people in his life personally in the staff in the white house or whether it's just this endless slop feed that he can gorge himself on the internet and then send out to other people as well. The one other thing. Oh yeah. Oh I was just going to say I may be dating myself here but it reminds me a lot of the George Costanza from Seinfeld line about it's not a lie if you believe it. Anyway continue sorry. That's true that's true technically true it can still be wrong but it's not a lie. Yeah there's one other thing that we ought to talk about in all of this because all of this AI stuff doesn't come from no place and it is connected to this increasingly powerful political fight that we are all having over data centers over the the you know warehouses full of computer chips where all this stuff gets cooked up. The president had this to

23:07say as part of his big posting binge just this morning a text post for a change you might have even written this one. The only reason that communities throughout the USA should not want data centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor if they want to be successful and rich with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place let data rain. The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them. If we kill the golden goose you will have only have yourselves to blame China could not be happier with this anti data center movement actually they can't believe it is happening president DJT I kind of like thinking that like yeah obviously he has been a pretty pro data center president he has a lot of tech guys who have been important to his reelection gave him a lot of money all these sorts of things but I also just like how much he likes AI is like don't kill my data centers you know how will I get my goose videos. You think that's what it's about okay. Maybe a little bit a little a column A little column B I don't know what what do you what do you make of it gathered. Oh god I'm going to get people in our comments so mad at us but like there is a grain of truth here which is that probably the Chinese government is delighted by the fact that there's

24:11so much nimvious movement in the United States against data centers that makes it difficult for us to compete with them on AI so it's you know it's like that onion meme about the worst person you know made a good point. So he's not entirely wrong on that he's completely wrong on the politics obviously like this is the one thing that has united Americans on the left and the right is their mutual discuss panic panic whatever. The area. I'm just like a good old man. Yeah exactly. Um god you're you're just a glutton for punishment. So yeah so the politics of this are are very very bad and I am sure Democrats around the country are salivating over this like they're just going to put this in every ad that they can if they can prove to the American public that like here's Donald Trump calling you a bunch of robes saying that your concerns about data centers you know some of which are valid and some of which are not you kind of have to differentiate but

25:13he doesn't do any of that obviously. Um that your concerns about data centers should be dismissed and your bunch of idiots and so um yeah that's great political material for Democrats. It really is interesting that he is leaning in on this so hard right now. He's the only politician in the country who is growing more strident in his defensive data centers. You have Republicans who were pretty pro data center before who are now running away guys like Greg Abbott and Texas. You have Democrats who were relatively pro data center before Josh Shapiro and Pennsylvania also running away right now. Nobody wants to be holding the I love data centers sign in November except apparently Donald Trump. Even again let's let's go back to JD Vance because even JD is a little bit more measured about some of this stuff than the president is here as him responding to that tweet today. President Trump today said the Americans should get on board with wanting more data centers. How does how do you think that message builds over for the ahead of the midterms for this becoming kind of a much planned area? Well what the president said about data centers is

26:15they're an important part of the AI economy when people build them they have to build the power plants along with the data centers. I think probably 99% of the backlash to data centers has come in areas where building a data center means higher utility and higher electricity for the people on the ground. So I think what these companies have to do is take advantage of some of the federal derogatory efforts that we've undertaken. If you build the data center you should be putting power back into the grid not taking it out and if that is happening I don't think the data centers are that controversial. All right let me get people mad at me for just one second. If the if the best thing the Trump administration did in Trump 1.0 was Operation Warp Speed with the vaccines and everything I think there's a pretty strong case we made that some of their data center policies this time around have been pretty good they actually have done a lot of work in trying to job on some of these companies into creating their own energy rather than slurping it all out of the grid and driving up people's utility prices like that it's actually pretty good policy on the ground in terms of addressing people's actual concerns about these sorts of things that said it has not at all

27:18blunted the giant wave of populist animosity against data centers that is sort of cresting right now and Democrats are absolutely right to be sort of salivating at the possibility of twisting the knife over this because they just don't the people just don't like data centers at all and like even if even if you as as President Donald Trump are like the biggest pro data center guy in the world you might think sitting at 35% popularity or wherever you are in any given pull right now staring down humiliation and disaster in the midterms you might think I'll save this this big data center push this big like you know bully pulpit job owning of the public about data centers I'll just push that off a few months I won't do it in you know late August ahead of the midterms but here we are here we are yeah I guess yeah maybe your theory is right I will say that this is a guy who usually has no qualms about pandering right like he goes with whatever wherever the populist wind is blowing and he's fine to make all sorts of promises that he has no intention

28:19of keeping about like not cutting Medicaid or whatever he's gonna give everybody free IVF like he's happy to make all sorts of promises that pull very well that he has no interest in and so it is a little bit weird that like in this particular case whatever the merits are of the policies that his administration is pushing or like what the right policies are on data centers I maybe agree with you on some of this disagree with you on some of it but we'll talk we'll save that for another time about the way to deal with the energy stuff in any event like it is weird that he has stuck his neck out here and again I wonder if that is partly about his information diet and maybe he doesn't have his finger on the populist pulse so well right now because like he's getting this spoon fed different diet right like it's people are creating all sorts of AI stuff and I guess he knows it's AI and maybe he makes the connection with data centers you know being enabling that AI I have no

29:22idea and so like maybe he doesn't even realize how pissed off people are I don't know again it's very hard to get a handle on what information is being given to this president about you know cost benefits of policies or even like cost benefit politically of different rhetoric or actions because like it's it's pretty clear he lives in this information bubble this as you put it like this hermetically sealed information bubble where he only hears what he wants to hear and those who are able to inject themselves into that bubble whether it's like I don't know some tech bro or anybody else I guess they can they can plant information that suits them and if he if he's like impervious to contradictory information because nobody's telling him showing him the bad polls then I don't know I'm just like spitballing here about how we ended up in this very bizarre situation. It's a really bizarre situation I guess it's not going to get better I guess it's going to continue to be bizarre which will continue to give us more stuff to talk about and the whole enterprise just

30:26keeps on you know chugging forward but I guess what my my last piece of advice for for democratic strategists out there even just just sort of lay people who would like to see more and more of this stuff from the president you know putting more and more of a of a boulder around his own neck going into these midterms you should create some AI generated video slop content of American Patriots falling to their knees with tears in their eyes in support of the president's fearless defense of data centers you should send that to Natalie Harp you should get it in front of the president it's really important that you remain convinced that what the American people are really crying out for is more data center commentary from him specifically I think that would be a very helpful for everybody. I really appreciate your good faith advice to the Republican party I think that's very generous of you. I live only to serve okay Catherine thanks for coming on to talk about some of this stuff we are going to continue to to observe from a safe distance the president's strange AI behaviors we are going to continue to hope that they do not actually

31:32crossover into real news too much is with this car gailand business and we're going to continue to make a lot of good content for all you people out in tv land so thank you for watching thank you for subscribing if you have not done so please do you can get our stuff at the bullwork.com as well we will see you all next time.