A former White House aide has likened President Donald Trump’s recent run of bizarre posting on Truth Social to “watching his brain rot in real time” amid growing exasperation over his online trolling.
The president has regularly made headlines through his social media output but caused particular concern over the Labor Day weekend when he posted no fewer than 60 posts in 10 hours, many of them AI-generated memes of highly inflammatory topics. They included the president surrounded by robots, playing the stock market and showing allied countries on a map draped by an American flag.
“He floods the zone with so much of it that we’ve become numb to just how bizarre it is,” ex-White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews told The New York Times.
“An 80-year-old president is spending a ridiculous amount of time consuming and reposting endless AI fan fiction portraying him as the biggest, strongest, and most important person alive.
“It feels like we’re genuinely watching his brain rot in real time.”
open image in galleryMatthews was part of the first Trump administration but resigned after the January 6 Capitol riot, subsequently testifying before the House Select Committee on the attack and, by doing so, earning the lifetime enmity of the president and his supporters.
The spree to which she referred saw the president spend Sunday issuing a deluge of memes via his personal platform, some of which entertained the idea of renaming New Mexico “New America” – following on from his wielding the Sharpie to rechristen Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico – while others mused on his own “greatness” relative to other presidents.
Some of the posts were eccentric but innocuous: Trump teased liberal Hollywood actor Robert De Niro, posed on horseback with George Washington and beside Transformers-inspired giant robots, imposed his face over that of the late Hulk Hogan and redesigned Space Force uniforms.
Others, however, were more consequential. In one, he could be seen battling Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on the rink as rival ice hockey players, making light of the very real trade war ongoing between the two neighbors.
In another, he posted a doctored map of the western hemisphere in which the Stars and Stripes covered the entirety of the North American continent, seemingly fantasizing about an imperial conquest of Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Mexico and the Caribbean Islands.
open image in gallerySeveral of the posts imagined Trump as a heroic wartime leader observing airstrikes on Iran from the deck of an aircraft carrier, blowing up Kharg Island or launching dual nuclear bombs from Outer Space.
In another, Trump posted a sketch of himself playing the stock market in the Oval Office and profiting from an investment in Intel shares, a company in which the government holds a 10 percent stake.
Maine Democratic Rep. Chellie Pingree responded to his keyboard antics by commenting on X: “This is truly unhinged behavior from the President of the United States… None of this is normal or okay.
“Republicans cannot keep shrugging this off. Congress, the Cabinet, and everyone around him has a responsibility to stop enabling this dangerous behavior and start asking whether he is fit to hold this office.”
Anti-Trump pundit Ron Filipkowski invoked the president’s much-discussed executive assistant, writing: “This is what Natalie Harp does all day for $150,000 salary from us.
open image in gallery“Troll the internet for weirdo twisted memes and videos from the cultists, show them to Trump, he approves them, then she puts them out to the world.”
Other commentators called for Trump’s Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office, seeing the posts as symptoms of the same “brain rot” diagnosed by Matthews.
But perhaps the most scathing reaction of all came from MS NOW anchor Lawrence O’Donnell, who described the memes one-by-one in an aghast tone on Tuesday’s episode of The Last Word.
O’Donnell likened the president to King George III, called him a “deeply sick man” and asked of one of his images: “What is that, if not evidence of insanity?”
“The president of the United States has lost his mind, and that is not a Hollywood screenplay,” he declared, pleading with the media to take Trump’s behavior more seriously and expressing outrage that he would spend his day posting slop, rather than working to solve the problems he was elected to address.
open image in galleryResponding to the outrage, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said: “Truth Social is the most powerful and popular social media platform in the world because it serves as President Trump’s authentic voice, where he communicates directly with the American people and the world without the biased media taking him out of context.”
But last weekend’s batch was only the latest from a president who has frequently courted controversy online.
Since returning to power, he has reimagined post-war Gaza as a glitzy resort, dreamed of dropping a plane-load of excrement on “No Kings” protesters, cast the Obamas as apes and portrayed himself as Jesus Christ.