In February, President Donald Trump threatened to “take over” Gaza and forcibly relocate its population of two million. A few weeks later, he posted a 33-second video to Truth Social featuring the tagline “GAZA 2025 WHATS NEXT?”

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In February, President Donald Trump threatened to “take over” Gaza and forcibly relocate its population of two million. A few weeks later, he posted a 33-second video to Truth Social featuring the tagline “GAZA 2025 WHATS NEXT?” The clip shows victims of war scrabbling in gray rubble and running from soldiers, until the color palette suddenly brightens and the people pass through an archway into the promised land of “Trump Gaza”: a grotesquely slick seaside metropolis of modernist beachfront mansions, hotels, and casinos branded with the President’s name. “The A.I. video made the neocolonialist mission nauseatingly explicit,” Kyle Chayka writes.
The video is the work of two Israeli-American filmmakers, Solo Avital and Ariel Vromen. The pair created the clip to test the capacities of the generative-A.I. software Arcana Labs. Avital said he set out to make a video that depicted Trump’s Gaza plan while satirizing the President’s self-aggrandizement. Vromen then put it on his Instagram. Avital urged him to take it down quickly, worrying that they might attract trouble for mocking Trump. Instead, Trump seemed to find the video inspiring.
“What was made as a quickie experiment has become one of the most consequential A.I.-generated videos to date, an animated successor to the ‘Balenciaga Pope’ image, from 2023, but this time serving as a piece of internet-native political propaganda,” Chayka writes. Trump’s misleading appropriation of the video was just the latest example of how the new Administration is using digital content as a form of MAGA agitprop, creating a digital mirror world that reflects the future that Trump imagines, however preposterous it may seem. Chayka writes about how the A.I. video’s “imagery is only as harrowingly uncanny as the Trump Presidency itself”.

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