While Donald Trump continues to wage war abroad, a new front has opened up. One fought not with missiles, but with AI-generated images deliberately deployed as weapons of propaganda.
We’ve seen this in the aftermath of the devastating bombing of an Iranian school by US forces. Following the attack, the Iranian Embassy in South Africa tweeted out a dramatic AI-generated video depicting the children and the pilots involved in the attack.
It’s a dramatic change in how public diplomacy works in the Trump era.
Manufacturing emotion
Historically, President Trump has not been subtle about his willingness to deploy AI for emotional effect.
He started experimenting with them in the 2024 campaign, with generated images that made a show of his racist claims about Haitian migrants. He trafficked in posts showing him lifting children out of flood waters in Florida.
Perhaps the most famous moment was at the peak of the devastation in Gaza, Trump’s White House released a video showing a reimagined territory – now a Trump-branded resort.
It came with the obligatory gold lettering of his name, and a gold statue for good measure, as if the Midas reference could not get more on the nose.
For the first year or so, AI was a tool that had no rival.
Liberals were too scared to use it because the political ecosystem in Silicon Valley had begun to feel so antithetical to the modern project on the left. Even conservatives and populists outside of the United States were not yet confident in how best to use it.
The concern for anyone looking to deploy them is that they will be accused of trying to manipulate reality.
Deepfakes are effective but once the gimmick has been discovered and people connect the dots back to whoever published the video, credibility is gone.
But that’s not how Donald Trump uses these AI-generated videos.
Constructing reality
When Trump posts, his followers are not expecting to see literal reality. The effect is a bit more impressionistic.
Trump is posting these to generate emotion.
His followers are not seeing actual truth, but a version of reality that they want to believe is true.
The illusion is powerful. Most people are very willing to dismiss what they see in front of their eyes, but convincing them that what they want to be true is actually a lie is nigh on impossible.
Trump’s audience is predisposed to believe in the reality of a Gaza remade as a Trump resort, in which the United States can be the saviour, the creator of long-needed peace in the region.
On the world stage, no propaganda apparatus could come close to the emotional power that these posts generate.
Russian propaganda focuses too much on destabilisation rather than landing any one point of view. The Chinese are over-invested in TikTok algorithms and driving a sino-futurism that erases its authoritarian grime.
Then came Trump’s attacks on Iran.
The post-truth war
The Iranian propaganda machine is not particularly subtle, but it understands the native language of the internet.
It has become very well practiced over the years of the Israeli war in Gaza fanning Western protest movements related to the war.
The goal wasn’t total revolution, but to encourage these young protestors toward the mutual goal of reducing Western ties to Israel.
When it came time for Iran to begin their online battle with Trump, they were prepared.
AI-generated videos began popping up, mostly from accounts run by Iranian embassies in developing countries, which quickly found their way into the centre of global discourse.
One post on 15 April by the Iranian Embassy in Tajikistan is a remix of Trump’s now-famous AI-generated image of himself as Jesus.
This new Iranian version shows a biblical Jesus punching Trump to the fiery pits of hell for his blasphemy. Within 24 hours, it had amassed more than 17 million views.
Then there is Explosive Media, an account that reimagines Trump and his inner circle as Lego figurines committing a myriad of war crimes, often set to scathing but catchy rap tracks.
It’s being called ‘slopaganda' – AI-generated slop weaponised for political ends.
Some feature a blocky, orange-faced Trump cast as ageing and isolated, his MAGA base squabbling around him. They are absurd, darkly funny and engineered to travel.
It is perhaps the most powerful form of propaganda.
It does not seek to convince anyone of something they do not already believe, but it gives them a new ally in their fight.
The truth was never the point
Western liberals typically have no common cause with the Islamic Republic, but they now find themselves as strange bedfellows against a common enemy.
We now live in a world in which the most powerful political communication operates entirely outside the question of truth.
The concern that many of us had at the advent of AI was that deepfakes would be so quickly deployed that they would render us unable to tell the difference between fiction and reality.
Instead, this war is giving rise to something far more important. It turns out that we never cared about the truth to begin with.
Nobody watching or creating any of these AI memes cares whether its real, but only that it affirms how they already feel about a conflict that is costing more lives by the moment.
We spent years worrying about whether AI could fool us. It turns out the harder question is whether we ever wanted to be told the truth at all.
Note: This article was first published 20 April 2026 on Pursuit. Read the original article.
Reviewed by Irfan Ahmad.
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by External Contributor via Digital Information World
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