The Slop Candidate – The Atlantic

For me, it's the amber glow of the fryer gently illuminating the exhausted 45th President of the United States of America. The bright light from the potato warmer casts a shadow on the left side of Donald Trump's face as he works at a McDonald's in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. This man, who just 1,369 days ago was in possession of the nuclear law, is now wearing an apron and handing out fast food.

The images of Trump's McDonald's stunt yesterday – where he shook the fryer and passed burgers out the window – are eerie. There's Trump, his face contorted in intense concentration, tipping a frying basket skyward; Trump hangs two-thirds of the way out of a drive-thru window, waving like a beleaguered Norman Rockwell character; Trump appears to be screaming with his mouth open in the middle of a fast food parking lot. The shadows of the McDonald's kitchen, the interplay between the shine of the stainless steel and the glow of the nugget-warming lights give this very real Photos have a distinct mid-journey aesthetic. These images immediately reminded me of the viral, shiny AI-generated images of Trump's arrest and imprisonment that began circulating in the spring of 2023.

Maybe it's because my feeds are simultaneously clogged with election-season garbage and AI-generated crap, but the McDonald's photo shoot struck me as a moment of strange synthesis where reality and technology-based fiction somehow collide through the internet's cultural particle accelerator were mixed. Trump offering dollar menu items isn't AI, but it's still sloppiness in all important respects: a hastily staged depiction of a fairly silly, if entertaining, fantasy designed to delight, troll, and what have you The most important thing is to underline a false impression of the candidate.

Read: The most revealing moment from a Trump rally

This is clarifying in that it shows that Trump's primary output is this always a kind of slop. Slop, in the context of AI, is broadly defined as spam, cheap blocks of text, video, or images quickly generated by computer programs for mass distribution. But non-synthetic crap is also everywhere. What would a Trump rally be if not a teleprompter reading of obtuse speech interspersed with the inexplicable? Lorem Ipsum about Hannibal Lecter and wind turbines created by the unknowable language model in Trump's own head? What are Trump's tweets and Truth Social shitposts if not mere tidbits thrown into the Internet ether for the rest of us to respond to? And what does the Trump campaign produce if not fantastical propaganda aimed at conjuring a false image of Joe Biden's America as a dark, dangerous place on the brink of destruction, besieged by immigrants and only saved by one heroic man can? (For example, today Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as an enthusiastic Pittsburgh Steelers lineman.) The photo op at McDonald's was hardly real: The restaurant was closed to the public during Trump's visit. He ignored a question about the minimum wage. Only pre-screened customers were allowed into the drive-thru, and those customers couldn't place orders — they simply took whatever Trump handed them. Like any good AI idea, the operation illustrated a fantasy — in this case, that Trump, a man who has long lived in a gilded penthouse, is a working-class man.

In August, I wrote that AI bullshit is now the aesthetic of the far right and MAGA coalition, in part because it allows bipartisans to illustrate the fictional universe they have been peddling and living for more than a decade. But the MAGA world has always dealt in crap. Old memes portrayed “God Emperor” Trump. Right-wing artists like Ben Garrison and Jon McNaughton have long portrayed Trump in an absurd light — hulking and hypermasculine or carrying a lantern on a boat, like George Washington crossing the Delaware. This was proto-slop for a simpler, more analogue time.

slut is not necessarily a commentary on quality, but rather on how it is intended to be consumed: fleetingly and with little or no thought beyond the initial limbic system response. The main feature of slop is that there is an endless supply of it. And that's why it makes sense that campaigns – not just Trump's – tend to trade on it. Campaigns are nothing more than aggressive, often desperate content farms hoping to grab attention. In service of this mission, memes, panders, emails and text messages, often in vile ways. Not unlike the fast food Trump touted, slop is sometimes tasty but never nutritious.

Read: The MAGA aesthetic is AI bullshit

AI crap has clogged the internet with synthetic ephemera, but it has also given a name to the man-made attention crap that is all around us – the crap that exists in real life, in meatspace. Trump really was at that Buck's County McDonald's, debasing himself for swing state votes in the same way candidates have for generations (see: Rick Perry eating a corn dog in 2011). The presidential campaign has long presented an unreal picture of American life—only made stranger by the presence of Trump.

If AI can teach us something about a man like Trump, the opposite also seems to be true. Leading up to the candidate's fast food stop, various news outlets, fans and even T-shirt sellers used generative AI tools to simulate what the visit might look like. The photos aren't too far off (some of them aptly show Trump in an apron), but they all seem to be trying too hard. In some cases, Trump's clothing is too bright; other times he carries around a comically large amount of food. None capture the unpleasant banality of the candidate's actual campaign stop. In his own way, Trump has shown us all the limits of artificial intelligence. At least for now, computers cannot fully capture the crushing surreality and maddening absurdity of modern electoral politics.