The Desperation of Donald Trump’s
Posts
Trump’s social-media habits are different when he can’t
control the narrative.
Clive Mason / Getty
July 22, 2025, 4:31 PM ET
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.
