President Donald Trump marked Labor Day, the unofficial start of the fall election season, as only he could: with a spree of bonkers social media posts that suggested, among other things, that New Mexico should be renamed “New America.” He also posted a series of artificial intelligence slop images depicting him as presiding over a hellish hi-tech autocracy with armies of robots.
His midterms strategy, if you can call what he’s doing “strategy,” is ignoring the polls that show his approval rating cratering and delving ever further into megalomaniacal fantasies of absolute power.
Between Saturday evening and Monday evening, Trump published more than 100 posts on Truth Social that included jabs at allies, egoistical boasting and a couple of posts depicting him conferring with President George Washington. But there were also some themes — at least nine fixated on changing the name of New Mexico. It’s quintessential Trump: floating a rebranding effort to conjure up right-wing nationalist ideas without achieving any substantive change. Never mind that Trump lacks the legal authority to change the name of a state. Suggesting that New Mexico be renamed allows him to taunt our neighbor to the south (in an unbearably corny way).
Trump’s thirst for power seems completely irrepressible.
In one of the posts unrelated to New Mexico, Trump stands before an army of robots shooting lasers out of their eyes. A fissured moon hangs over his head, and below the image a caption reads, “They will dream of us forever.” In another, he walks before a different robot army — this one features flying spiders! — and the caption reads, “They will never sleep again.” In yet another, he stands on a throne flanked by giant robots, with a caption that says, “Give them nightmares.”
If we lived in a functioning democracy, these posts would be considered politically disastrous and a glaring sign that a party needed to immediately remove its leader.
If we take the posts at face value, Trump appears OK with the leader of an openly sadistic regime using autonomous weapons to suppress the population. If we don’t take the posts at face value, then who knows what they mean. They aren’t purely ironic — there isn’t anything funny about the images, and in the real world, Trump sincerely and ceaselessly attempts to accumulate power using every tactic he can. Ultimately, the images betray his reported desire to be seen as a great man of history. Trump reportedly believes he belongs on a list of many of the most powerful men in human history, including Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, William the Conqueror, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. He wants to be feared.
But the disconnect between Trump’s frivolous “New America” obsession and his robot tyranny distills how his ambition is destined to go unfulfilled. Trump is too petty, self-involved and fixated on shallow branding exercises to be an effective despot. In fact, he’s so petty, self-involved and fixated on shallow branding exercises that he’s not even able to put his party in the best position to maintain a majority in Congress.
Consider that Trump is begging voters to “pretend” that he’s on the ballot and reportedly planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars available to his super PAC, MAGA Inc., making the case that he — not the rest of the GOP — is who voters should consider themselves to be voting for. (He has however donated $10 million to Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton.) Yet Trump is as unpopular as he’s ever been, has lost his touch with endorsements and he has no solutions for widespread anger over the cost of living, exacerbated in no small part by his catastrophic war on Iran.
Trump’s thirst for power seems completely irrepressible. It’s leading his messaging to become stranger, more vulgar, more cartoonish. He’s gambling that enough Americans share his sentiments to keep his movement afloat. I wouldn’t bet on it.
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