In rooms across the world, government ministers and parliamentarians hold serious discussions about how to challenge the threats posed by big tech – particularly AI and social media.
These risks range from tackling misinformation and polarisation, to managing the economic challenges of AI job losses, to assessing whether AI poses an existential threat to humanity.
Usually, however, such discussions have not centred on what to do when the problem on social media is the President of the United States, steward of the world’s largest economy and commander-in-chief of its mightiest military.
Amid a bizarre and extended flurry of posting through the night, after his flight to a midterms campaign rally in Alaska, Donald Trump posted a video compilation to his 13 million followers on Truth Social showing lions and tigers mauling people in or around their enclosures.
Among the grotesque posts was footage of William Chapman, a young British man, being mauled to death by a tiger after he jumped into its enclosure at Yorkshire Wildlife Park last weekend.
In the video the animal, is seen pawing and biting the victim, though his death is not shown. The zoo had specifically requested that people not share the footage, out of respect for the dead man’s family. South Yorkshire Police said at the time: “We are aware of videos circulating online and we would encourage people not to share this distressing footage.”
Not that moral qualms have ever stopped the US President from doing exactly what he wants. Trump captioned his post: “Don’t ever mess with nature! President DJT.”
The White House’s official rapid response account even reposted the video on X.
Now, parents who just days ago lost their son – a man in his twenties who faced serious challenges from mental illness – face the repercussions of it having been shared with hundreds of millions of people across the planet by the most famous man in the world. They have been traumatised anew, for no discernible purpose.
Trying to find any kind of logic or reason in Trump’s social media output is an increasingly difficult task even for those of us who follow it closely – but his series of big cat posts eventually culminated in an AI slop video featuring himself.
That video showed Trump – an obese 80-year-old who increasingly walks with a pronounced shuffle – chasing down and playfully wrestling with a tiger, successfully besting it, then posing happily alongside a now similarly cheerful big cat. Perhaps, before he did this, Trump’s hardline defenders could have tried to argue he was trying to warn about the dangers of intruding upon wildlife.
Now, it is hard to avoid facing up to the reality that the President shared footage of a man’s death, against the express wishes of his grieving family, so he could use an AI slop video to suggest he could beat a tiger in a fight.
Some might argue that when compared with Trump’s many other shortcomings, this ranks relatively low down the list. It is arguably not even the worst thing the Trump family has done with regard to big cats, given that his sons have been photographed and filmed on trophy hunts – shooting and killing wildlife on safari in Africa.
But we do have to face the deep weirdness of the situation in which we find ourselves. The problems that cross the desk of the US President are nightmarishly difficult. The continued freedom of Ukraine, and the political stability of Europe, still relies upon US defence co-operation. Taiwan’s continued liberty is similarly US-dependent.
The global economy is reliant upon Trump finding a way out of the Iran conflict – but similarly, economies across the world could crash if the US deficit isn’t brought under control, or if the AI bubble is handled badly by the US government. He controls the fates of people well beyond the borders of the country he leads.
What, then, are we supposed to think when the President seems more preoccupied with sharing grisly videos showing people’s deaths, and when he seems unable to distinguish these from obvious AI fakes? What does it say about his ability to prioritise, handle complex information, and make challenging decisions, when he seems barely able to follow basic social media rules, or meet basic societal norms?
There is no dancing around it. The sitting President of the United States has shared a snuff video on social media, and he seems to have done it for little reason other than he found it interesting – or he saw an opportunity for self-aggrandisement. And across the world, we try to pretend that Trump is a normal political leader, or the same man in his second term as he was in his first.
There is no big political agenda at play here, no complex web of advisers. This is Trump unfiltered, flexing his id and his ego, and it is horrible to behold.
The final thought is maybe the most worrying: the midterm elections are less than three weeks away, and they will decide the course of the remainder of Trump’s second term. He and his party already look to be in deep trouble. He has every reason right now to be on his absolute best behaviour, to appeal to as many Americans as he possibly can.
That raises the question: what if this is him on his best behaviour? The prospect of what he might be like when he will never again face the voters becomes an alarming one indeed.