On Sunday, our thoughtful and reserved president reposted on his Truth Social site a video generated by artificial intelligence that falsely showed former President Obama being arrested and imprisoned.
There are those among you who think this is high humor; those among you who who find it as tiresome as it is offensive; and those among you blissfully unaware of the mental morass that is Truth Social.
Whatever camp you fall into, the video crosses all demographics by being expected — just another crazy Trump stunt in a repetitive cycle of division and diversion so frequent it makes Groundhog Day seem fresh. Epstein who?
But there are three reasons why this particular video — not made by the president but amplified to thousands — is worth noting, and maybe even worth fearing.
First, it is flat-out racist. In it, Obama is ripped out of a chair in the Oval Office and forced onto his knees, almost bowing, to a laughing Trump. That imagery isn’t hard to interpret: America’s most esteemed Black man — who recently warned we are on the brink of losing democracy — forced into submission before our leader.
The video comes as Trump claims that Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, has uncovered a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” in which top Obama officials colluded with Russia to disrupt the election. Democrats say the claim is erroneous at best.
If you are inclined to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, right before this scene of Obama forced to kneel, a meme of Pepe the Frog — an iconic image of the far-right and white supremacy — flashes on the screen.
Not subtle. But also, not the first time racism has come straight from the White House. On Monday, the Rev. Amos Brown, pastor of San Francisco’s Third Baptist Church and a student of Martin Luther King Jr., reminded me that not too long ago, then-President Woodrow Wilson screened the pro-KKK film “The Birth of a Nation” at the executive mansion. It was the first film screening ever held there, and its anti-Black viewpoint sparked controversy and protests.
That was due in no small part to a truth that Hollywood knows well — fiction has great power to sway minds. Brown sees direct similarities in how Wilson amplified fictional anti-Blackness then, and how Trump is doing so now, both for political gain.
“Mr. Trump should realize that Obama hasn’t done anything to him. But just the idea, the thought of a Black person being human, is a threat to him and his supporters,” Brown told me.
Brown said he’s praying for the president to “stop this bigotry” and see the error of his ways. I’ll pray the great gods give the reverend good luck on that.
But, on the earthly plane, Brown said that “the more things change, the more they remain the same.”
Trump courted the Black vote and has his supporters among people of all colors and ethnicities, but he’s also played on racist tropes for political success, from stoking fear around the Central Park Five, now known as the Exonerated Five, decades ago to stoking fear around Black immigrants eating cats and dogs in Ohio during the recent election. It’s an old playbook, because it works.
Reposting the image of Obama on his knees is scary because it’s a harsh reminder that racism is no longer an undercurrent in our society, if it ever was. It’s a motivator and a power to be openly wielded — just the way Wilson did back in 1915.
But the differences in media from back in the day to now are what should raise our second fear around this video. A fictional film is one thing. An AI-generated video that for many people seems to depict reality is a whole new level of, well, reality.
The fear of deepfakes in politics is not new. It’s a global problem, and in fairness, this isn’t the first time (by far) Trump or other politicians have used deepfakes.
Trump last year reposted an image of Taylor Swift endorsing him (which never happened). Also last year, during the election and the height of the Elon Musk-Trump bromance, the billionaire posted a fake photo of political challenger Kamala Harris dressed in what looked like a communist military uniform.
Trump himself has not been immune. In 2023, Eliot Higgins, the founder of the investigative outlet Bellingcat, said he was toying with an AI tool and created images of Trump being arrested, never thinking it would go viral (especially since one image gave Trump three legs).
Of course it did, and millions of people looked at these fake pictures, at least some assuming they were real.
The list of deepfake political examples is long and ominous. Which brings us to the third reason Trump’s latest use of one is unsettling.
He clearly sees the effectiveness of manipulating race and reality to increase his own power and further his own agenda.
Obama on his knees strikes a chord all too close to the image of Latino Sen. Alex Padilla being taken to the floor by federal authorities a few weeks ago during a news conference. It bears chilling resemblance to the thousands of images flooding us daily of immigrants being taken down and detained by immigration officers in often violent fashion.
Videos like this one of Obama are the normalizing, the mockery, the celebration of the erosion of civil rights and violence we are currently seeing being aimed at Black, brown and vulnerable Americans.
There is nothing innocent or unplanned about these kinds of videos. They are a political weapon being used for a purpose.
Because when repetition dulls our shock of them, how long before we are no longer shocked by real images of real arrests?
