On Saturday, millions of people across the U.S. attended “No Kings” protests—a slogan born in response to President Donald Trump’s self-aggrandizing social media posts where he’s called himself a king, including with AI-generated images of himself in a crown, and his continuous stretching of executive power. While Americans were out in the street, the president was posting.
In an AI-generated video originally posted on X by a genAI shitposter, Trump, wearing a crown, takes off in a fighter jet to the song “Danger Zone” like he’s in Top Gun. Flying over protestors in American cities, Pilot King Trump bombs people with gallons of chunky brown liquid. It’s poop, ok? It’s shit. It’s diarrhea, and in reposting it, it’s clear enough to me that Trump is fantasizing about doing a carpet-bomb dookie on the people he put his hand on a bible and swore to serve nine months ago. The first protestor seen in the video is a real person, Harry Sisson, a liberal social media influencer.
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The video Trump reposted to Truth Social
But this was not clear, it seems, to many other journalists. Most national news outlets seem scared to call it how they see, and how everyone sees it: as Trump dropping turd bombs on America, instead opting for euphemisms. Some of the best have included:
- The Hill called it “brown liquid” and “what looked like feces”
- The Guardian deemed it “brown sludge” and “bursts of brown matter”
- More “brown liquid” from the New York Times
- NBC News got close with “what appeared to be feces”
- A CNN contributor’s “analysis” said Trump was “appearing to dump raw sewage”
- Axios’ helpful context: “suspect brown substances falling from the sky”
- ABC News opted to cut the video before the AI poop even started falling
The New York Post, never one to waste a prime alliteration opportunity, didn’t disappoint: “Trump’s fighter jet was shown dropping masses of manure.”
I can understand some of these venerated news establishments might be skittish about using a word like “poop” in their headlines, and I can also concede that I haven’t had an editor tell me I can’t use a bad word in a headline in a long, long time. I can imagine the logic: we can’t “prove” it’s meant to be shit, so we can’t call it shit. But there’s nothing in these outlets’ style guides that has kept them from saying “poop” in the headline in the past: “Women Poop,” the New York Times once proclaimed. Axios writes extensively and frequently about dog poop. CNN’s analysis extends to poop often.
Along with the above concessions, I can also promise I don’t feel that passionately about getting poop on anyone else’s homepages. But we are in an era where the highest office in the country is disseminating imagery that isn’t just fake and stupid, but actively hostile to the people living in this country. When I first saw someone talking about the Trump Poop Bomber video—on Reels, of all places—I thought it must be someone doing satire about what they imagined Trump would post about the protests. I had to search for it to find out if he really did, and what I found was the above: trusted sources of truth and information too scared to call fake poop fake poop. It’s not about poop, it’s about being able to accurately describe what we see, an essential skill when everything online is increasingly built to enrage, trick, or mislead us. AI continues to be the aesthetic of fascism: fast, easy, ugly. When we lose the ability to say what it is, we’re losing a lot more than the chance to pun on poop.
Add to this the fact that no one in Trump’s circle will say what we can all plainly see, either: that the president hates the people. “The president uses social media to make the point. You can argue he’s probably the most effective person who’s ever used social media for that,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said at a news conference this morning. “He is using satire to make a point. He is not calling for the murder of his political opponents.” Johnson did not say what that point was, however.
