The End Goal of Trump’s Cringey, Nonsensical Videos

We’ve come to expect such aesthetic absurdity from him. Heck, that wasn’t even his first time using “Fortunate Son” as a soundtrack to military spectacle; it played during his June 2025 military parade in Washington, D.C. Another video from the same genre, which he posted back in June, pairs a montage of stealth bombers raining munitions with Vince and the Valiants 1980 song “Bomb Iran,” a parody of the Regents’ chipper 1961 hit “Barbara Ann.”

So it’s no surprise that in his second term, Trump has leaned especially hard into the most absurd content that exists today: AI-generated videos. He has posted videos of Barack Obama being arrested and of Santa Claus in an ICE vest rounding up foreigners, not to mention the infamous one in which he pilots a fighter jet, a golden crown atop his head, and unleashes shit on No Kings protesters. And as with “Fortunate Son,” he has used content without an apparent understanding of its meaning: Almost a year ago, he shared an AI-generated video of “Trump Gaza,” which depicted the 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 scholar of Theodor Adorno has described, drawing from German critical theorist’s writings on antisemitism, as “the incapacity to be moved by contradiction.” For the far right, what’s more important is an aesthetics of domination. The Trump administration is flooding our senses without regard for coherence, in the hope we exhaust ourselves trying to make sense of something that’s completely contradictory or willfully absurd. At which point we become numb to it all, which is the ultimate goal.