AI in politics: How deepfakes weaponise nostalgia to obscure accountability in public infrastructure projects
Original framing: “Trump posts AI-edited photo to brag about White House restoration work” — The Verge
The *Trickster* archetype—embodied by figures like Hermes, Anansi, or the Native American Coyote—reveals the absurdity of treating AI manipulation as a mere technical flaw rather than a deliberate subversion of truth. Coyote, for instance, often exposes hypocrisy through deception, much like how Trump’s AI-edited photo lays bare the performative nature of political ‘restoration.’ The trickster lens also highlights the irony of a president who once dismissed ‘fake news’ now wielding AI to create it, turning the tables on his own rhetoric.
The Trump White House AI incident is not an isolated case of political deception but a symptom of a deeper crisis: the erosion of visual sovereignty in the digital age.
By weaponising nostalgia and algorithmic manipulation, political actors exploit the same cognitive vulnerabilities that colonial powers once leveraged to justify dispossession—now repackaged as ‘restoration.’ The absence of Indigenous, historical, and cross-cultural perspectives in mainstream coverage obscures how this tactic fits into a long lineage of visual propaganda, from Stalin’s retouched photographs to the U.S. government’s staged imagery of the Hoover Dam. Solutions must move beyond technical fixes like AI detectors and instead address the structural power imbalances that enable such manipulation, whether through decolonised digital literacy, global coalitions for visual integrity, or reclaiming AI as a tool for restoring marginalised histories. The trickster lens reveals the absurdity of treating this as a mere ‘gaffe,’ while the scientific and artistic dimensions underscore the urgent need for systemic safeguards that protect collective memory from algorithmic erasure.