The man who looks like musk only rests at 20 years younger and makes another cut to abdominal dancer with big breasts, shaped hips and full whiskers before eating hummus. This jarring sequence brings us to the chorus. “Trump Gaza, bright and bright/golden future, brand new light/east feast and dance, deeds are being carried out/Trump Gaza, No.”
When the chorus is repeated, enter the “after” part of the spot. A child walks down the glittering boulevard and holds a mylar balloon shaped like the head of a president. The president himself chats with a young woman at a casino. Money falls from the sky. The aforementioned golden statue is at the heart of a busy roundabout, with Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu taking a cocktail with his shirt off in the pool. The whole thing is more capable and more skilled than most people can produce, but in Patrick Bateman's style, it's a major AI that's crazy skilled in Patrick Bateman style, as if the automaton had seen thousands of commercials and decided what a human would look like.
Given how much generative AI has been occurring recently, it is surprising how quickly its aesthetic features can be recognized. High contrast textures, perceptually diffusing lighting, forced shots of people walking down city streets and passing through arched openings. It doesn't look as dreamy as the visual rendering of a dream account. The gentle failure of object persistence and the sense that we've seen before were not perfect, but it didn't look like that.
As soon as this visual style became familiar it seemed to become the dominant aesthetic of the pro-trump internet. With the exception of venture capitalists, the demographics that seem to have most enthusiastically embraced AI are perhaps the people who rejected it the loudest: graphic designers, journalists, photographers, filmmakers, musicians and teachers, who are typical liberals. With the reactive logic of MAGA rank and file, AI is good because the right person hates it.
This dynamic has created a culture of computer-generated irony with distinctive properties. It's not the steady irony of Jonathan Swift or Stephen Colbert. The audience can turn to ironists to say the opposite of what he means. Instead, it is an unstable irony, obscuring or at least plausible denying its true meaning. President Trump himself popularized this approach by saying, “consistently ignores accurate, if not accurate, and speaks in a hyperbolic style in which his followers understand that they are true of the gospel rather than literal. The Trump Gaza video is ironic in the slippery sense of the word. It is to say more than you mean (Trump's literal golden idol), or to say what you mean in a sense that no one can call something serious (two stereotypical abdominal dancer), or to call attention as a gesture of unconditional loyalty (all of the golden leaves) to your leader's weaknesses.
