The video opens with a child picking through the ruins of Gaza while a gunman stands menacingly over him. A pool of blood appears out of nowhere.
The words “What’s next?” appear in large letters, and a terrifying insight into Donald Trump’s vision for Gaza follows in the form of an AI-generated slop reel, shared by the president himself.
In a few short seconds, the landscape is transformed into Trump’s idea of paradise: beaches, brand-new hotels, restaurants and sports cars. A gurning Elon Musk is devouring some kind of dip, Donald Trump is pawing at a belly dancer and then, inexplicably, baring his nipples on a sun lounger alongside Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump’s name and image appear throughout the dizzying series of clips on hotels, souvenirs, and in the form of a giant golden statue, as is his wont.
Cash rains down at random intervals, Musk gobbles more indistinguishable dip, a child carries a golden ballon of Trump’s head, bearded belly dancers sway on the beaches and an eerie soundtrack with a robotic voice declares “Trump Gaza is finally here.”
The Palestinians who have lived in Gaza for countless generations are never seen again after those first frames — they have presumably been swept away with the rubble to some unknown place. The graves of tens of thousands killed by Israel’s massive bombardment of the strip appear to have been paved over and replaced by restaurants.
Trump shared the video on his Truth Social network on Tuesday night, prompting outrage, mockery and confusion.
AI-generated videos are not yet sophisticated enough to make any sort of sense — they are akin to a fever dream where nothing feels real, where all logic is suspended, and random firings of code produce surreal glitches. The same is true of Trump’s vision for Gaza.
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After trying and failing to explain his shocking plan for the bombed-out strip using words and speech, he has now turned to ramblings of an unknown algorithm, likely prompted by a bored teenager in some far corner of the world, to translate for him.
It is somehow even worse than his previous efforts to sell the idea. Trump’s Gaza, the video suggests, is so garish that it would make Dubai look like Gary, Indiana. It is ethnic cleansing packaged as a slick real estate promotional video.
The video is only 30 seconds long, but it leaves out several steps that would have to occur between the present-day Gaza and Trump’s end call — namely the forcible removal of nearly two million Palestinians and likely another war more devastating than the last.
Trump’s allies used to struggle to explain his all-caps tweets when cornered by reporters in the halls of Congress. Now they have to interpret his imaginary golden statues and Musk’s insatiable appetite for dips. The media, too, is forced to entertain his teenager-like trolling.
America’s adversaries used to have to spend billions of dollars to figure out what the president of the United States was truly thinking. Now they need only to log on to Truth Social in the early hours of the morning to confirm their worst fears.
It’s a terrifying insight into the president’s mind. While Palestinians in Gaza are still picking out bodies from the rubble, while babies are freezing to death in the bitter cold because their homes have been destroyed, Trump is dreaming up ways to enrich himself from the ruins.
Trump promised unparalleled transparency in his second term, but no one expected to learn this much about how he thinks.
It also says something about his corrosive media diet. During his first term, Trump would park himself in front of a television for hours a day watching Fox News and blasting out missives in reaction to whatever scraps of news he could see. Today, he is consuming content from the most unhinged corners of the internet.
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The most powerful man in the world would rather watch fan edits of his most deranged ideas than read intelligence briefings from the CIA.
The content of the video is disturbing enough, but what it represents for America’s place in the world is awful too.
Many believe the growing prevalence of these videos is a sign of the so-called “enshittification” of the internet. It’s a term coined by tech critic Cory Doctorow and commonly used to describe the degradation of online platforms into uselessness. Facebook is often used as a prime example, primarily because it has become awash with AI slop similar to the video Trump shared.
Those videos are usually shared by users of a certain age across Mark Zuckerberg’s platform, many of whom are blissfully unaware that what they are sharing is AI-generated. The platform is now a stream of unreality and fakery, and 78-year-old Trump is not immune to this phenomenon.
By sharing his unfiltered fever dreams with the world, Trump is heralding the enshittification of the presidency.
