President Donald Trump's holiday weekend crash-out revealed an alarming truth about his state of mind, according to a new column.
MS NOW's Zeeshan Aleem analyzed more than 100 Truth Social posts made by the 80-year-old president Saturday and Monday evening over Labor Day weekend mixing grandiose AI-generated imagery with trivial nationalist gestures, including at least nine fixated on renaming New Mexico "New America" — a proposal he has no legal authority to carry out.
"It’s quintessential Trump: floating a rebranding effort to conjure up right-wing nationalist ideas without achieving any substantive change," Aleem wrote.
Far more unsettling, according to the columnist, were a series of AI-generated images depicting Trump commanding armies of robots, including one showing him before laser-eyed robots beneath a fissured moon captioned "They will dream of us forever," and another with him enthroned beside giant robots captioned "Give them nightmares."
"If we take the posts at face value, Trump appears OK with the leader of an openly sadistic regime using autonomous weapons to suppress the population," Aleem wrote. "If we don’t take the posts at face value, then who knows what they mean. They aren’t purely ironic — there isn’t anything funny about the images, and in the real world, Trump sincerely and ceaselessly attempts to accumulate power using every tactic he can."
This juxtaposition — grandiose fantasies of robotic tyranny alongside a "frivolous" state-renaming obsession — reveals Trump as too self-involved and fixated on shallow branding to be an effective authoritarian, or even an effective party leader.
"The disconnect between Trump’s frivolous 'New America' obsession and his robot tyranny distills how his ambition is destined to go unfulfilled," Aleem wrote. "Trump is too petty, self-involved and fixated on shallow branding exercises to be an effective despot. In fact, he’s so petty, self-involved and fixated on shallow branding exercises that he’s not even able to put his party in the best position to maintain a majority in Congress."
The piece closes by tying Trump's cratering popularity to unresolved public anger over the cost of living, worsened, the columnist argued, by his war with Iran.
Trump's strategy of leaning into ever-stranger, more vulgar and cartoonish messaging, Aleem concluded, is unlikely to be enough to save Republicans from losses in November. "I wouldn't bet on it," Aleem wrote.
