Trump AI images ran across Truth Social for hours on Sunday, July 26, in a posting spree that started with a doctored picture of a CNN anchor and ended somewhere near a fantasy of seizing an Iranian oil tanker. There was no caption on most of them. No explanation. Just image after image, dropped in sequence like a fan account clearing out a camera roll.
It opened with Kaitlan Collins. The picture placed her behind a spread of Bud Light cans, which only lands if you watched the White House Correspondents’ Dinner two days earlier. Collins won the White House Correspondents’ Association award for broadcast on Friday, July 24, for her coverage of the Oval Office confrontation between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump used his time at the podium to call the award fake, tell her she never smiles, and compare her to Dylan Mulvaney by way of a joke about the Bud Light can. CNN Worldwide chairman Mark Thompson issued a statement while Trump was still speaking, saying the network stands by its journalists. Collins posted a Theodore Roosevelt quote to Instagram the next day without naming him. Sunday’s image was Trump returning to the same joke with a picture instead of a punchline.
From there the Trump AI images went after Chris Christie twice. The first put the former New Jersey governor at a Bruce Springsteen concert, stained with grease and mustard, hand raised for a high five that Springsteen is visibly not returning. The banner behind the stage read “Bored in the USA.” A sign in the crowd read “Bruce Still Rocks,” with fine print underneath clarifying that he rocks us to sleep. The second put Christie in a boxing ring against Congressman Jerry Nadler, billed as “Big Chris” versus “Little Jerry,” fighting over a slice of cheesecake on a pedestal labeled the Cheesecake Championship.
Then came the late night hosts. Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert were drawn sitting on a Manhattan sidewalk in torn clothes, each holding a cardboard sign reading that they are talentless, not funny, ex comedians who need money. The wall behind them is tagged with the words “Late Night Is Over.” Rosie O’Donnell got her own entry, illustrated at a cottage table in Ireland in a shirt reading “TDS Forever,” Guinness on the mantel, leprechaun on the shelf, writing a letter that opens “my dearest Donald.”
Roughly halfway through, the Trump AI images stopped being about celebrities and started being about a war. One showed a strike on Iran’s Kharg Island. Another showed an Iranian tanker in flames under the words “No More Engines.” Two more showed Trump standing on the deck of a captured Iranian vessel, fist raised, American flag hoisted over the Iranian one, captioned “It’s Our Oil Tanker Now.” Another put him at the helm of a Navy destroyer in a red FAFO hat with a strike group behind him.
That shift is the part worth sitting with. The United States and Iran are actively at war. Commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has effectively stopped, and oil topped $100 a barrel on July 23. Trump has threatened to hit a bridge or a power plant every time Iran targets a ship transiting the strait. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi publicly objected to Trump using seized Iranian assets to pay for damaged vessels, warning that normalizing confiscation puts everyone’s assets at risk. The House voted to halt the war without congressional approval, a similar measure failed in the Senate, and Republicans are split on his use of war powers. The cartoon tanker post is not commentary on a distant conflict. It is a sitting commander in chief making memes about ships that are on fire right now.
The other thread running through the whole spree was 2028. Trump AI images kept putting the same red hat in frame. A tuxedoed version of him pulling one on at a podium under a Trump 2028 banner. A gallery installation with the hat suspended from the ceiling and a polygonal bust of him below it, two men in suits looking up. A close up of him smoking a cigar in one. A pink Trump 2028 Save America hat photoshopped onto a picture of him from decades ago on a brick sized cell phone. A stadium sized coffee mug reading Trump 2028, ringed by hundreds of identical people in neon jackets screaming at it. And a horror movie poster of him walking through fog flanked by red eyed figures, captioned “Give the Enemy Nightmares,” with Trump 2028 at the bottom. The 22nd Amendment bars a third term. The merchandise keeps coming anyway.
The last cluster was pure self mythology. One image placed him shoulder to shoulder with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton under the words America First. Another was a four panel grid of him from military school through his real estate years to now, captioned “The Man Who Saved America.” A third showed jets over a beach with two people waving flags, titled “Trump’s America.” A fourth was a fabricated photo of him standing on the White House lawn next to John F. Kennedy. There was also a full movie poster casting him as the star of something called Cosmic Commander, complete with fake credits and an IMAX logo.
Trump is 80 years old and posted more than 560 times on Truth Social in April alone, according to the Daily Beast, about a third of them overnight. Pew Research puts Truth Social usage at around 3 percent of Americans, which means almost nobody sees these posts on the platform itself. They travel because screenshots travel. That is the actual machinery here, and Sunday was a clean demonstration of it.
