The End Goal of Trump’s Cringey, Nonsensical Videos

We expect such aesthetic absurdity from him. Hell, this wasn’t even the first time he’d used “Fortunate Son” as the soundtrack to a military show; it was broadcast during its June 2025 military parade in Washington, DC. Another similar video, which he posted in June, pairs a montage of stealth bombers raining munitions with Vince and the Valiants’ 1980 song “Bomb Iran,” a parody of the Regents’ 1961 hit “Barbara Ann.”

So it’s no surprise that during his second term, Trump has taken a particular look at the most absurd content in existence today: AI-generated videos. He’s posted videos of Barack Obama being arrested and Santa Claus in an ICE vest rounding up aliens, not to mention the infamous video in which he flies a fighter jet with a gold crown on his head and spouts bullshit on the No Kings protesters. And as with “Fortunate Son,” he used content without apparently understanding its meaning: Almost a year ago, he shared an AI-generated video of “Trump Gaza,” which depicted the Gaza Strip as a resort paradise, replete with a golden statue of Trump. The video’s creators later said it was a satire of Trump’s “megalomaniac idea.”

The far right suffers from what one Theodor Adorno scholar has described, drawing on the German critical theorist’s writings on anti-Semitism, as “the inability to be moved by contradiction.” For the far right, what matters most is an aesthetic of domination. The Trump administration is flooding our senses with little regard for coherence, hoping that we will exhaust ourselves trying to make sense of something completely contradictory or willfully absurd. At that point we become desensitized to it all, which is the ultimate goal.