Among the dozens of Truth Social posts President Donald Trump shared over the past weekend were several AI-generated videos and images, including three that featured Trump and President George Washington signing a map with quills, riding horses and walking around Trump’s vision for the White House “military complex” and ballroom.

Trump’s post frequency and use of AI have become fairly routine, but experts aren’t certain what exactly it’s doing for him. Renee Hobbs, a communication professor at the University of Rhode Island, told HuffPost it’s likely a tactic to project Trump’s own “preoccupation with his legacy.”

But the timing of his posts also suggests something more deliberate could be in play, according to experts.

This weekend, while Trump posted AI images of himself and Washington, a story was continuing to break on the poor conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, which is deployed in the Middle East. Hobbs argued the coincidence shouldn’t be ignored.

“These social media posts displace real news,” she said.

Instead of focusing on how fake the images are, Hobbs said, they’re “knowingly ridiculous.” By being so over the top, it’s likely the posts will be shared, mocked and argued over, which tends to keep them at the top of social and news feeds instead of other stories.

Cara Finnegan, a communication professor at the University of Illinois who studies visual political rhetoric, however, told HuffPost that she doesn’t see the posts as strictly one thing or the other.

“I don’t think it’s just distraction; I don’t think it’s just narcissism,” she said. Instead, Finnegan argues, the images are painting Trump not just as connected to past presidents but as their equal.

Presidents have always used art and images to visually tie themselves to past presidents and leaders — in the past, it was mostly through presidential portraits in the Oval Office. Trump’s AI images take it a step further.

“He’s not just positioning himself as, ‘I’m connected to Washington,’” Finnegan said. “He’s almost positioning himself as a peer of Washington.”

These image comparisons may be intended to serve a practical purpose, Finnegan said. The AI video of Trump and Washington walking through a rendering of the proposed White House ballroom was posted as the administration is pushing the Supreme Court to allow construction to move forward.

“He’s kind of using that weird Washington-in-the-door-of-the-ballroom meme to basically say the Supreme Court should support the ballroom because it’s patriotic to do so,” Finnegan said.

Whether this is intentionally coordinated is an open question, however. Finnegan told HuffPost she doubts there is any strategy session behind Trump’s posts.

“I think Trump just goes with what he likes,” she said. Still, it doesn’t make his posting pattern meaningless, she added.

“They could be distractions, they could be kind of amplifying his role as president, they could be related to policy decisions,” she said. “I don’t think it’s random.”

Michael Spikes, an assistant professor and director of the Teach for Chicago Journalism Program at Northwestern, told HuffPost that Trump’s choice of platform also can help shape what he gets away with.

“His audience may not be concerned about the use of these synthetic images, which obviously are not real,” Spikes said. “We haven’t gotten to a point where artificially generated imagery would start popping up in ways where people would be misled.”

The frequency of his posting may also result in people and the media growing accustomed to the images.

“The impact of them might sort of fade over time,” Spikes said. “I think it may just be normalizing the kind of communication that comes out of this administration.”

Finnegan agreed. “For him, the world of AI is just another context that he can take advantage of.”

When HuffPost reached out to the White House about the posts, spokesperson Davis Ingle said, “TRUTH Social is the most powerful and popular social media platform in the world because it serves as President Trump’s authentic voice, where he communicates directly with the American people and the world without the biased media taking him out of context.”

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