Just before midnight on February 25th, President Donald Trump posted a thirty-three-second video to Truth Social, the right-wing social network he owns, featuring the tagline “GAZA 2025 WHATS NEXT?” The clip shows victims of war scrabbling in gray rubble and running from soldiers, until the color palette suddenly brightens and the people pass through an archway into the promised land of “Trump Gaza”: a grotesquely slick seaside metropolis of modernist beachfront mansions, hotels, and casinos branded with the President’s name. Money rains down from the sky, above a simulacrum of Elon Musk. Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu sip cocktails bare-chested on the beach. Effigies of Trump’s head abound, including atop a towering golden statue of the man. The statue’s disproportionately long legs were just one clue that the video’s strangely smooth and symmetrical compositions were made using artificial intelligence. Its soundtrack was an A.I.-generated, clubby song with lyrics such as “Trump Gaza shining bright, golden future, a brand new light.” Earlier in February, Trump had threatened to “take over” Gaza, forcibly relocate its population of two million, and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” The A.I. video made the neocolonialist mission nauseatingly explicit.
Trump’s sharing of the clip to his nine million followers on Truth Social, with no acknowledgment of its source, suggested that he was claiming it as a rendering of his policy plans. It immediately found a wider audience: headlines, including one from NPR, described the video as “Trump’s.” In fact, it is the work of two Israeli American filmmakers, Solo Avital and Ariel Vromen, who run an A.I.-driven studio in Los Angeles called EyeMix Immersive Visuals. The pair created the clip in early February, in the course of eight hours, as a way to test the capacities of the generative-A.I. software Arcana Labs, which is made by another L.A.-based company. The news of Trump’s Gaza statements had just broken and, Avital told me on a recent video call, miming an expression of shock, “I couldn’t believe my ears and my eyes.” Avital grew up near Tel Aviv but spent a lot of time near the Gaza border. “I always believed in the idea of coexistence,” he said. But he added that he’s felt alienated at times by liberal “cancel culture” and wokeness and thinks the left’s vision of a liberated Palestine, so long as Hamas remains in power, is as fantastical as Trump’s plan for a Middle East Riviera. “What if Trump really will take over Gaza? I mean, it’s not such a bad thought. I’m not totally against it,” he said, but added, of Palestinians, “I think it’s not realistic unless he includes them in it.”
Avital set out to make a video that depicted “giving the Palestinians a Dubai-lavish life style”—Trump’s Gaza plan, minus the mass expulsion—while satirizing Trump’s self-aggrandizement. (“I have a touch for comedy,” he assured me.) Stationed at his computer in L.A., Avital created A.I. models of Trump and Musk, then generated one scene after another by feeding Arcana prompts: “Imagine if Trump Plaza was Trump Gaza”; “A Dubai-like beach with yachts and restaurants”; “Elon Musk in a restaurant eating hummus.” He insisted that the video was not meant to be callous. “I didn’t do it to make people look down at the Palestinians,” he said. But perhaps his Trump satire was not as pointed as he’d hoped. Avital sent the finished video to Vromen. The two passed it around among friends and family, then Vromen, who is an established filmmaker for outlets including Netflix, put it on his Instagram, where he has more than a hundred thousand followers. But Avital urged him to take it down quickly, worrying that they might attract trouble for mocking Trump. Trump, who is not known to shy away from gold, or an effigy, seems instead to have found the video inspiring.
Avital and Vromen don’t know exactly how Trump obtained the clip, which had been on Instagram for only a few hours, but on the day Trump shared it, Avital’s phone lit up with a barrage of messages. He told me that, in the time since, he has experienced online threats and hacking attempts, but that he was most bothered by the fact that Trump had shared the video shorn of any context. “You give the public the ability to kidnap it and abduct it into their own narrative,” Avital said. What was made as a quickie experiment has become one of the most consequential A.I.-generated videos to date, an animated successor to the “Balenciaga Pope” image, from 2023, but this time serving as a piece of internet-native political propaganda.
Trump’s misleading appropriation of the video was just the latest example of the new Administration turning digital content, produced in-house or found online, into a form of MAGA agitprop. On February 18th, the official White House account on X posted a video without attribution titled “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight,” a clip that appeared to show immigrants being forced onto planes as the sounds of clinking handcuffs and roaring engines played softly in the background. The joke, if you can call it that, seemed to be casting a scene of state terror as an example of the soothing autonomous-sensory-meridian-response videos that proliferate online. On February 19th, reaffirming Trump’s promise to kill New York City’s new congestion pricing, the White House account on X posted a faux Time cover of Trump as king, wearing a crown against a backdrop of the city’s skyline. Cumulatively, these pieces of content amount to more than A.I. slop; they help to create a digital mirror world that reflects the future that Trump imagines, however preposterous it may seem. In the real world, Trump’s vision of Gaza as an ethnically cleansed luxury resort may seem like political fantasy. But, on the internet, Trump Gaza already exists as a virtual beachside destination to like and to share.
During his first term in office, Trump used social media as a round-the-clock bully pulpit, spewing threats and insults and self-regard. His Twitter account was a megaphone that reached not just his base of supporters but the world at large. By the time he had his account suspended for inciting the riot of January 6, 2021, he had collected eighty-eight million followers. Today, the titillating, increasingly extreme content he produces is targeted at a more self-selecting audience. In recent years, the social-media landscape has become fragmented, and right-wing audiences have coalesced around Truth Social and X. The respective owners of those platforms, Trump and Musk, are now running the federal government while continuing to cultivate their online echo chambers of MAGA glorification and viral mistruths, and, with the popularization of generative A.I., the misinformation is no longer confined to chaotic tweets. Avital said that the virality of his Gaza video made it clear to him that A.I. is a dangerous boon for extremist politicians: “The wildest idea that you ever imagined could be visualized right now.”
A.I. tools in filmmaking tend to serve as technical assistance, performing tasks such as editing or color grading. A.I. apps, including Runway and Sora, are capable of generating short clips. But Arcana is designed to be a comprehensive A.I.-based production and editing suite, using basic language instructions to generate images and video clips out of thin air and then string them together into longer movies. Jonathan Yunger, who co-founded Arcana in 2023, told me that he values verisimilitude in the software’s output above all. “We’re constantly fine-tuning and making models for realism,” he said, but the technology is not perfect. Regarding the Trump Gaza video, he added, “It’s clear that it wasn’t real.” However blatantly A.I.-generated, though, the video gains a veneer of believability from the fact that the President of the United States is disseminating it. The imagery is only as harrowingly uncanny as the Trump Presidency itself.
Avital compared the threat of A.I. to Orson Welles’s 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds,” which stirred a panic among some listeners who believed that a real alien invasion was upon them. Like the radio listeners of yore, audiences for A.I. have not yet built up fluency in the medium, making them susceptible to manipulation. Avital imagined a chilling scenario in which someone posted an A.I. clip of “Trump announcing that he’s beginning the Third World War, and he just launched a nuclear weapon toward Russia.” How persuasively realistic would that footage be? If powerful people shared it, what terrible misunderstandings might ensue? A.I. technology is growing more capable all the time; its advance is being measured in months, not years. Of the Trump Gaza video, Avital said, “If we really had to make this as a movie, we would invest a week on it, and you wouldn’t be able to tell if it’s real or not.” ♦
