The Slop Candidate
5 min read
For me, it’s the amber glow of the fry machine gently illuminating the exhausted 45th president of the United States of America. The glare of the potato-warming apparatus 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 held the nuclear codes just 1,369 days ago, is now wearing an apron and doling out fast food.
The images of Trump’s McDonald’s stunt—in which he jiggled the fryer and handed burgers out of a window yesterday—are uncanny. There’s Trump, face contorted in the appearance of deep concentration, tilting a fry basket to the heavens; Trump hanging two-thirds of the way out a drive-through window, waving like a beleaguered Norman Rockwell character; Trump, mouth agape, appearing to yell into the middle distance of a fast-food parking lot. The shadows of the McDonald’s kitchen, the interplay between the sheen of the stainless steel and the cast of the nugget-warming lights, give the very real photos a distinct Midjourney aesthetic. These pictures immediately reminded me of the viral, glossy AI-generated images of Trump being arrested and thrown in jail that started circulating in the spring of 2023.
Perhaps it’s because my feeds have been simultaneously clogged with election-season garbage and AI-generated slop, but the McDonald’s photoshoot struck me as a moment of strange synthesis, where reality and tech-enabled fiction felt somehow mashed together by the internet’s cultural particle accelerator. Trump proffering Dollar Menu items isn’t AI, but it is still slop in all the ways that matter: a hastily staged depiction of a fairly stupid, though entertaining fantasy, meant to delight, troll, and, most important, emphasize a false impression of the candidate.
This is clarifying, insofar that it demonstrates that Trump’s primary output is always a kind of slop. Slop, as it relates to AI, is loosely defined as spammy, cheap blocks of text, video, or images, quickly generated by computer programs for mass distribution. But nonsynthetic slop is everywhere too. What is a Trump rally but a teleprompter reading of stump-speech slop, interspersed with inexplicable lorem ipsum about Hannibal Lecter and wind turbines spun up by the unknowable language model in Trump’s own head? What are Trump’s tweets and Truth Social shitposts if not slop morsels, hurled into the internet’s ether for the rest of us to react to? And what is the Trump campaign producing if not fantastical propaganda intended to conjure a false image of Joe Biden’s America as a dark, dangerous place on the verge of destruction, besieged by immigrants, and savable only by one heroic man? (For instance, earlier today, Trump posted an AI-generated picture of himself as a buff Pittsburgh Steelers lineman.) The McDonald’s photo op was barely real: The restaurant was closed to the public during Trump’s visit. He ignored a question about the minimum wage. Only prescreened customers were allowed in the drive-through, and those customers were not able to place orders—they just took whatever Trump handed to them. Like any good AI slop, the op 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 slop is now the aesthetic of the far-right and MAGA coalition, in part because it allows hyper-partisans to illustrate the fictional universe they’ve been peddling and living in for the past decade-plus. But MAGA world has always trafficked in slop. Old memes depicted “God Emperor” Trump. Right-wing artists including Ben Garrison and Jon McNaughton have long illustrated Trump in an absurd light—hulking and hypermasculine or holding a lantern on a boat, like George Washington crossing the Delaware. This was proto-slop, for a simpler, more analog time.
Slop isn’t necessarily a commentary on quality so much as on how it is meant to be consumed: fleetingly, and with little or no thought beyond the initial limbic-system response. The main characteristic of slop is that there is an endless supply of it. And so it makes sense that campaigns—not just Trump’s—tend to traffic in it. Campaigns are nothing if not aggressive, often-desperate content farms hoping to get attention. In service of that mission, they meme, pander, email, and text, frequently in cringeworthy fashion. Not unlike the fast food that Trump was hawking, slop is sometimes delicious, but it is never nutrient dense.
AI slop has clogged the internet with synthetic ephemera, but it has also given a name to the human-made attentional grist that’s all around us—the slop that exists in real life, in meatspace. Trump was really at that Buck’s County McDonald’s, debasing himself for swing-state votes in the same way that candidates have for generations (see: Rick Perry eating a corn dog in 2011). Presidential campaigning has long offered an unreal portrait of American life—it’s just been made more peculiar by the presence of Trump.
If AI slop can teach us something about a man like Trump, it seems that the opposite is also true. In the lead-up to the candidate’s fast-food stop, various news outlets, fans, and even T-shirt sellers used generative-AI tools to mock up what the visit might look like. The photos aren’t terribly far off (a few of them accurately placed Trump in an apron), but all of them seem to be trying too hard. In some, Trump’s clothing is too garish; in others, he’s toting a comically large amount of food. None capture the awkward banality of the candidate’s actual campaign stop. In his own way, Trump has shown us all the limits of artificial intelligence. Computers, at least for now, cannot quite capture the crushing surreality and maddening absurdity of modern electoral politics.
