On Sunday, our reflexive and reserved president published again in his social site of truth, a video generated by artificial intelligence that falsely showed former President Obama arrested and imprisoned.
There are those among you who think that this is in great humor; those of you who find it as boring as offensive; And those of you who do not know the mental swamp that is the social truth.
Regardless of the camp in which you are, the video crosses all demography when expected: only another Trump's crazy trick in a repetitive cycle of division and fun so frequent that it makes the day of the marmot look fresh. Epstein Who?
But there are three reasons why it is worth pointing out this particular video, not made by the president, but extended to thousands, and maybe it is worth fearing.
First, it is racist. In it, Obama is torn from a chair in the oval office and forced on his knees, almost leaning, to a Trump laugh. These images are not difficult to interpret: the most estimated black man in the United States, which recently warned that we are on the verge of losing democracy, forced to undergo our leader.
The video occurs when Trump states that Tulsi Gabbard, director of National Intelligence, has discovered a “traitorous conspiracy in 2016” in which Obama's senior officials colluded with Russia to interrupt the elections. Democrats say that the statement is wrong at best.
If you are inclined to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, just before this Obama scene is forced to kneel, a pepe the frog meme, an iconic image of the extreme right and the white supremacy, stands out on the screen.
Not subtle. But also, not the first time that racism comes directly from the White House. On Monday, Reverend Amos Brown, shepherd of the Third Baptist Church of San Francisco and a student of Martin Luther King Jr., reminded me that not long ago, the then President Woodrow Wilson project the Pro-Kkk film “the birth of a nation” in the executive mansion. It was the first projection of films that took place there, and its anti-Negro point of view caused controversy and protests.
That was largely due to a truth that Hollywood knows well: fiction has a great power to influence minds. Brown sees direct similarities in how Wilson amplified the fictional anti-blackness at that time, and how Trump is doing it now, both for political profits.
“Mr. Trump should realize that Obama has not done anything. But only the idea, the idea that a black person is human, is a threat to him and his followers,” Brown told me.
Brown said he is praying for the president to “stop this intolerance” and see the error of his roads. I will pray to the great gods to give the reverend good luck.
But, on the earthly plane, Brown said that “the more things change, the more they are still the same.”
Trump courted the black vote and has its supporters among people of all colors and ethnicities, but has also played with racist tropes for political success, from fear in Central Park Five, now known as the exonerated ones, decades ago, until the fear of black immigrants who eat cats and dogs in Ohio during the recent elections. It is an old play book, because it works.
Reposting the image of Obama on knees is scary because it is a hard reminder that racism is no longer an underground current in our society, if it ever it was. It is a motivator and a power to be openly managed, as Wilson did in 1915.
But the differences in the media in the past so far are what our second fear around this video should increase. A fictitious film is one thing. A video generated by AI that for many people seems to represent reality is a completely new level of, well, reality.
The fear of the deep politics is not new. It is a global problem, and to be fair, this is not the first time (with much) Trump or other politicians have used deep.
Trump last year he published an image of Taylor Swift supporting him (which never happened). Also last year, during the elections and the height of Elon Musk-Trump's joke, the billionaire published a false photo of the 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 Bellingcat research exit, said he was playing with an AI tool and created Trump images being arrested, never thinking that he would become viral (especially because an image gave Trump three legs).
Of course he did, and millions of people looked at these false photos, at least some assuming they were real.
The list of political examples of Deepfake is long and sinister. What leads us to the third reason why Trump's last use is disturbing.
It clearly sees the effectiveness of manipulating race and reality to increase your own power and promote your own agenda.
Obama on knees hits a chord too close to the image of the Latin senator Alex Padilla taken to the floor by the federal authorities a few weeks ago during a press conference. It has a similar similarity with the thousands of images that flood us daily of immigrants who are demolished and detained by immigration officers often violently.
Videos like this Obama are normalization, mockery, the celebration of the erosion of civil rights and violence that we are currently seeing to be aimed at black, brown and vulnerable Americans.
There is nothing innocent or not planned in this type of videos. They are a political weapon that is used for a purpose.
Because when the repetition opens their shock, how long before we are no longer surprised by real images of real arrests?
