Bulwark Takes - The President Is Posting Fake Bombings and Threatening Allies

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

Donald Trump is posting AI-generated war footage, threatening Canada, spreading dangerous vaccine misinformation, and flooding Truth Social with bizarre content—and Andrew Egger and Catherine Rampell are trying to make sense of it all.From the fake footage showing U.S. strikes on Iran’s Kharg Island to Trump’s bizarre AI videos about Canada, the president’s latest posting binge raises a bigger question: Does Trump know what’s real anymore? And when the president’s information diet is increasingly filled with AI slop designed to flatter his worldview, the consequences go far beyond embarrassing social media posts.Fall Show Tickets: thebulwark.com/events

Hey guys, welcome to Bullwork Takes. I am Andrew Eger, joined by my colleague Catherine Rampel to talk about a real tear the president has been on social media. This has been, you know, 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, you know, 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. He's posted more than 100 times on truth social, including a number of just insane, bizarre, AI generated cliffs. We're going to walk through a few of them for your edification and bemusement. before we do that, Catherine, is this, are we crazy to see this as kind of like a new thing for

the president? I mean, I know we've had had moments like this, you know, here and there over the last year or so with Trump just sort of dabbling in 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. Like 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, chat GPT away or Claude or whoever, like whatever software or aid, you know, if 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. 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 purportedly showing U.S. strikes being carried out on Iran's oil facilities at Karg Island. Let'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 sloped. He just tweeted out Carg Island being blown to Smithereens, President DJT, at a moment when the U.S. was carrying out strikes on Iran. And the Pentagon had to get out there and walk that back, say, 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, like it's a 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 tease us up really well into a couple of these other clips because it kind of cuts both ways with AI, right? 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 verisimilitude in that one. There 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. But 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 brouhaha over Lake Ontario, which Trump is trying to rename Lake America. Let's play those real quick back to back. What? This is the president. I mean, it is amusing. I will say that. 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. Yeah, 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 Donald 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 guy off the screen. I hadn't even watched that

one through to know there was a second cut of music. I thought it was just morning 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 it were a random fan, you know, I'd be like, whatever. I don't want to get too up in arms over the fact that, like, he has a fan 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 injury for our Canadian friends. 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 Carg Island one we mentioned a minute ago. But also just 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 Carg Island clip, by the way, he tweets that out. And then, and again, not suggesting it's AI, just saying, here's Carg Island, getting bombed by us. That's pretty awesome. Does he understand what is reality and what is not reality? And then 30 seconds after that. Yes. Literally 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 Amish community. He says, In 330 years, no published case has been explicitly documented with an unvaccinated Amish child with autism. It goes down to cite this supposed study. I poked around on this a little bit.

It's silly. This is the sort of garbo infographic that these chatbots will spit out for you. It doesn't actually say anything about anything. It's just saying you can't find a documented Amish 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's spitting out something that is flattering to his particular priors. He does believe there is such a thing as a connection between vaccines and autism.

And apparently, like so many Americans, turning to chatbots 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 reactions 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 caused by this. And I think it's particularly tone deaf for him to do this in the wake of the measles linked death in Pennsylvania, which appears to be 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 while 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 you 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 away. And the fact that we cannot do this with the leader of the free world is much more consequential. I mean, 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 or are paying attention to all of this and we'll use it against him. We'll use it against Americans. And Americans will use it against themselves because maybe they'll decide, hey,

our great president says that this is evidence somehow that my kid won't get autism. If they don't get an MMR vaccine, meanwhile, there's a major measles outbreak. So I don't know. Everything about this is just gross to me. Yeah. Very sad. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's it is so interesting. You bring up 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 problem. 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. Boerick was going on tour this fall for the good fight tour. And tickets are available right now at thebill.com slash events. Sarah, JVL, Tim, 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. Going to enjoy this one. Perfect for the October tour date. I'm going to crack this. Not today. It's about 2.30 p.m. 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 bollug friends coming to your city.

And be sure to grab your tickets and come hang out with us. So 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 J.D. Vance being asked specifically about that Karg Island clip. It's like, whoa, 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 Karg 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 bombings.

of Park 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 announcements about military actions on social media. But 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. commercial shipping, you guys are behaving like a terrorist country. You've got to stop,

but there are going to be some consequences. Yeah, so, you know, relatively polished politician, J.D. 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 nonplussed that like there's

just this AI slop that that gets to him and then he sends it out. Yeah, it gets to him. He sends it out. Again, we don't know if he's differentiating between 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 egregious that the then president posted. It was like, well, I don't want to have to deal with it. I guess J.D. Vance cannot claim that he's not following with bated 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 like have to put some kind of veneer of rationality on it. And honestly, I admire J.D. Vance's performance there. I could not have done that. As you said, like he did as about 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, like, 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. Exactly. I would definitely admire him more then. But I am not particularly expecting that outcome. So I guess, you know, 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, you know, 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 just 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, right? I mean, 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 back sloppers and people who are, you know, 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. And that's all bad enough. But when you add on top of that, this the sick of fancy machine, like this, this greatest ever piece of technology for flattering somebody's priors and telling them exactly what they want to hear in the form of, you know, these AI chat bots. And I should say, I don't know for a fact that Donald Trump is is out there, you know, prompting GROC or prompting Claude himself, you know, in the Oval Office on his $20 enterprise subscription or whatever. But he gets the same thing because people are constantly sending him this stuff. And Natalie Hart is constantly showing him this stuff. And it comes to the same thing.

I mean, like 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 awesomest guy ever. And he's Jesus Christ and he's hanging out with, you know, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. And it's like, this is a guy who's already predisposed to believe all this sort of stuff about himself, right? And 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 he's posting and 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 Cargile on fake strike or whatever the AI generated strike. It's like if he thinks that there's there's a universe where this would be celebrated, this is enough. And 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, right? Like they are directionally the same thing, but one seems a lot worse. It's one thing if you have cabinet members and aides who are unwilling to show him bad poles, for example, or bad economic data. It's another thing when they're like creating out of whole cloth with benefit of the AI tools that are now available, this like alternate universe where there are these, you know, 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. He 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 aides are or Grock is or whatever else because they can supply the fabricated evidence to create that alternate reality. Yeah, yeah. And when you hear him talk about it, it is pretty clear. That is, you know, that's the universe he believes himself to be living in, you know,

where we're in the golden age and America is 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. I mean, these things are, 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 the sort of delusion that he has. wrapped himself in. And 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, I think if you hooked him up to a lie detector and we're like, sir, are you the greatest president of all time? He'd be like, absolutely. Is it the golden age for America? It sure is. Is America the hottest country on earth? Well, obviously, it's the hottest country on earth. Muhammad bin Salman told me so himself, you know? So, so, and again, I just think, you see the geese video? Yeah. Yeah. And I, 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, this endless slop feed that he can gorge himself on on the internet and then send out to other people as well. The one other thing. Oh, yeah, go ahead.

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. 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 warehouses full of computer chips, where all this stuff gets cooked up. The president had this to say, 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 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 D.J.T. 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. He's like, don't kill my data centers. How will I get my goose videos after this? You think that's what it's about. Maybe a little of both. A, little of column A, little column B. I don't know. What do you make of it, Catherine?

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, that there's so much nimbious movement of 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 disgust. Panic, whatever.

hysteria. Hysteria. I'm just trying to get people bad at me too. Yeah, exactly. God, you're just a glutton for punishment. So, yeah, so the politics of this 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 roobes 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 he doesn't do any of that, obviously, that your concerns about data centers should be dismissed and you're a bunch of idiots. And so, 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 defense of data centers. You have Republicans who were pretty pro-data center before, who are now running away, guys like Greg Abbott in Texas.

You have Democrats who were relatively pro-Data center before. Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania also running away right now. Nobody wants to be holding the I Love Data Center sign in November, except apparently Donald Trump. Even, again, let's go back to J.D. Vance because even J.D. is a little bit more measured about some of this stuff than the president is. Here is him responding to that tweet today. President Trump today said that Americans should get on board with wanting more data centers. how do you think that message goes over ahead of the midterms where this is becoming kind of a touch point in some areas?

Well, what the president said about data centers is they'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 deregulatory 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 controversy. 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 to be 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-own 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. 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 blunted 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 even if you 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 poll right now, staring down humiliation and disaster in the midterms,

you might think, I'll save this big data center push, this big like, you know, bully pulpit jaw-boning 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 all are. It's because he loves AI. 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 of keeping about like not cutting Medicaid or whatever. He's going to give everybody free IVF. Like he's happy to make all sorts of promises that poll very well that he has. 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 and 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, enabling that AI. I have no idea.

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 pretty clear he lives in this information bubble, 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 pro or anybody else, I guess they can plant information that suits them. And if he's like impervious to any 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 get. us more stuff to talk about, and the whole enterprise just keeps on, you know, chugging forward. But I guess my last piece of advice for Democratic strategists out there, or even 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 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 he 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 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 observe from a safe distance the president's strange AI behaviors. We are going to continue to hope that they do not actually cross over into real news too much as with this Carg Island 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 bulwark.com as well. We will see you all next time.