When future historians look back and try to understand just how bizarre politics were in 2025, a useful period to revisit would be early July.
That’s when Elon Musk, shortly after his acrimonious split with the White House and accusations Trump was in the Epstein files, watched as his Grok AI anti-“woke” chatbot began calling itself “MechaHitler” and praising the genocidal leader.
While xAI quickly moved to take down the comments and ban hate speech posts, the offensive flare-up on a flagship product from one of the country’s richest and most politically connected figures captured the fast-moving, and often disorienting, ways politics and AI collided in 2025.
Top to bottom, AI impacted everything about national politics this year, from the president’s high-stakes trade negotiations with China, to the granular ways Americans communicated and sussed out fact versus fiction.
No one in politics was more eager to embrace AI than Donald Trump, who built on early experiments during the 2024 campaign and proceeded to turn AI into his in-house “propaganda” factory, churning out countless, often outrageous, digital images to promote his policies and mock his enemies.
Accounts tied to the president, immigration agencies, and other top government figures now put out near daily AI-generated images and videos, though perhaps none were as striking as a September post, in which Trump made an Apocalypse Now-style image of himself as a general declaring “war” on Chicago, as the White House targeted the city for its next immigration crackdown.
“Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” the Truth Social post read, a striking message of aggression from a U.S. leader against an American city.
Mike Ananny, an associate professor of communications and journalism at the University of Southern California, said such images being shared at the highest level suggest a new political paradigm is underway. Being caught using doctored or fake images used to be considered shameful and verboten. Not so anymore.
“There’s no sense of, ‘Oh no, we were caught using a synthetically generated image,” he told The Independent. “All gloves are off. People don’t seem to care.”
Republicans weren’t the only ones hopping on the trend.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, as part of his recent turn towards Trump-style online trolling tactics, now fires back at the MAGA crowd with near-daily AI images of his own, including a recent December post for “cuffing” season showing Trump, White House Deputy chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in handcuffs, set to a song from a 2022 Saturday Night Live sketch.
The same AI-fuelled dynamic played out in high-profile local races, including the harshly fought New York City mayoral race. There, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s campaign briefly released and then deleted an AI video featuring fake testimonials from “criminals for Zohran Mamdani,” his opponent, prompting criticisms that the former governor was using racist stereotypes. (The campaign later said the video was mistakenly posted by a “junior staffer.”)
From the very first moments of the Trump administration, which began with major tech companies involved in AI lavishing donations on the president’s inauguration, artificial intelligence has been a core part of the White House agenda at home and abroad.
Domestically, AI drove huge parts of the Trump economic strategy.
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