Trump's AI-Fueled Claims and the 2024 Election: A New Era of Misinformation

Column | 'AI' crowds and unskewed polls: Trump prepares to reject another loss

Sorry, a summary is not available for this article at this time. Please try again later. The first person who I noticed spreading the idea that images of Vice President Kamala Harris's rally in Michigan had been manipulated was conservative moviemaker Dinesh D'Souza. On Saturday evening, D'Souza posted a photo on social media of Harris exiting her airplane with a crowd of supporters looking on. Two reflections from the airplane were circled in red, illustrating that, despite the crowd, no one was visible in the reflection. "Does this look like a real picture to you?" D'Souza asked. Within hours, similar questions were everywhere on social media -- and by Sunday, had popped up in former president Donald Trump's feed at Truth Social. Skip to end of carousel Sign up for the How to Read This Chart newsletter Subscribe to How to Read This Chart, a weekly dive into the data behind the news. Each Saturday, national columnist Philip Bump makes and breaks down charts explaining the latest in economics, pop culture, politics and more. End of carousel "Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she 'A.I.'d' it, and showed a massive 'crowd"' of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN'T EXIST!" Trump wrote. "She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane." "She's a CHEATER," he reiterated. That D'Souza was at the leading edge of this argument is not surprising. It was D'Souza, you may recall, who produced a feature-length movie arguing without evidence that the 2020 election had been stolen by "mules" who collected and submitted ballots on behalf of Joe Biden. Then, as now, D'Souza's claims were rooted in a trivial misrepresentation of digital information. There was a crowd in Michigan to meet Harris, as shown below in a photograph taken by a Washington Post photographer. You can also see why the reflection from the plane didn't show the crowd; it was angled away from the speaking platform. No AI. No whistleblowing maintenance worker, ginned up from the ether to make the claim of dishonesty seem more credible. And no "cheating" by Harris. Why would Trump and his allies spread a false claim about attendance at a rally that was covered on C-SPAN? In part because many elements of Trump's base have embraced rejections of basic reality (like the existence of "mules") for years. In part it's confirmation bias, with partisans being more likely to accept false information as true when it supports their preexisting beliefs. But in part it's because Trump and his allies are already eagerly raising questions about the reliability of measures of Harris's support -- and by extension, the reliability of the results in November. Harris is a CHEATER, Trump asserts. It is not subtle. Recall that his efforts to reject the 2020 results did not emerge out of the blue in November of that year. Trump began raising questions about the purported insecurity of mail-in ballots soon after it became obvious that the coronavirus pandemic would spur more remote voting. He and his staff amplified all sorts of claims about ballot security, including a bizarre claim that July that a mail truck that caught fire was somehow suspicious. His base was more than prepared when he subsequently challenged the actual election results. That's the pattern that is again underway, exemplified well beyond this one goofy assertion about the Michigan rally. In reporting its lengthy assessment of Trump's recent campaign stumbles, the New York Times spoke with someone close to Trump who described the former president's framing of Harris's ascent to be her party's nominee. "Mr. Trump told one aide," Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported, "that Democrats were trying to 'steal' the election again from him -- comparing the reshuffling of the Democratic ticket to when state legislatures changed voting rules midway through the 2020 election cycle because of the Covid pandemic." States making it easier for people to vote without risking coronavirus infections in 2020 was not cheating in any way that doesn't assume that ensuring voters can vote is somehow unfair. Nor is a political party choosing its own nominee. But it is important to Trump that he keep this escape hatch open, this idea that the election was or will be stolen from him even in the most abstract terms, because it allows him to muster resources to contest his loss or, alternatively, to retain the loyalty of his base. A loss this November looks more possible than it did a month ago, certainly. Over the weekend, the New York Times released new swing-state polling showing Harris with leads across the Upper Midwest. So, naturally, Trump's campaign released a memo suggesting that the polling was fake or misleading. The results, pollster Tony Fabrizio and data consultant Tim Saler argue, "dramatically understated President Trump's support both among all registered voters and in their likely-voter model." Their evidence for this is that the recalled vote of respondents -- that is, people saying how they voted in 2020 -- understates the actual support Trump saw in those states four years ago. As Fabrizio certainly knows, though, voter recall is unreliable. People tend to misremember or misreport how they actually voted, with a shift in favor of the electoral winner. In fact, there's been research showing that using recalled votes to adjust current polls is fraught. But that's what Fabrizio and Saler do. "In each state, the gap between the survey's recalled 2020 vote and the reported 2020 election results is more than the margin between Kamala Harris and President Trump," they write. "Once again, we see a series of public surveys released with the clear intent and purpose of depressing support for President Trump." That last argument is particularly silly. The idea -- one Trump himself offered repeatedly in 2020 -- is that polls showing Trump trailing somehow makes Trump supporters less likely to support Trump. It's not clear how this manifests; is the argument that those voters will consider casting a ballot in November until they remember the Times's August poll? The simple answer is that this unskewing of the poll (to revive an infamous 2012 phrase) is simply meant to suggest that no measure of reality can be trusted unless it favors Trump. The results in those states might not reflect this poll, certainly, but the argument that the results were skewed against Trump to damage him in some esoteric way is ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as claiming that an unnamed worker at an airport is more reliable than multiple photos and live video. But the point isn't to increase Trump's credibility. It's to erode everyone else's. That way, when they accurately report the results in November, Trump can remind his supporters to reject them if necessary.

Trump's Latest Falsehood Is a Huge Tell

When the former president feels most vulnerable, he begins to deny reality. When Donald Trump is at his most vulnerable, when he feels most threatened, he tells fans not to believe their own eyes and ears. After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, he called the event a "love fest," denying the video evidence of the violence. After the writer E. Jean Carroll accused him of sexual assault, he said he had "never met" her, despite a photo showing them together. And yesterday, after Kamala Harris finished a week of arena-size rallies, he claimed that images of her crowds were "fake" and AI-generated. Specifically, Trump embraced a conspiracy theory -- touted by pro-Trump social-media accounts known for peddling nonsense -- that the Harris campaign had posted a fake crowd photo from her August 7 event in Romulus, Michigan. "Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?" he wrote. "There was nobody at the plane, and she 'A.I.'d' it, and showed a massive 'crowd' of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN'T EXIST!" Read: Trump can't deal with Harris's success The turnout at Harris events is entirely real, and political analysts suspect that the crowds she has attracted are making Trump jealous and nervous. But the AI lie is about more than Trump's size anxiety -- it portends a dark and desperate chapter in this already distressing presidential-election season. Alex King, a 32-year-old political organizer who lives outside Detroit, was at the August 7 rally holding a Harris-Walz sign and wearing a blue shirt. He immediately recognized himself in the picture that Trump shared and pretended was fake yesterday. "There was nobody there!" Trump wrote. But King was there, and he told me the former president's post was "disheartening and frankly disrespectful." Every time Trump challenges his fans to side with him over photographic proof of reality, it's disrespectful. I have been keeping an informal list of such episodes since the inauguration-crowd-size controversy of 2017, and they are typically driven by Trump's enormous insecurity. "The first lie of the Trump presidency," as The Atlantic's Megan Garber dubbed the inauguration freakout, began with a 5 a.m. segment on CNN the day after Trump was inaugurated. The CNN anchor John Berman very gently pointed out that Trump had predicted "they were going to break records with the crowds" in Washington, but "it doesn't look like they did," and he showed a graphic juxtaposing Barack Obama's historic 2009 crowd on the left and Trump's smaller crowd on the right. Trump erupted, and his aides came up with "alternative facts" to deny reality. Read: The first lie of the Trump presidency Toward the end of his presidency, Trump minimized the crowd sizes at protests, claiming that Black Lives Matter drew a "much smaller crowd in D.C. than anticipated" when in fact a rally over the death of George Floyd in police custody was the largest gathering in the nation's capital since the Women's March on the day after his inauguration. More recently, during his hush-money trial in Lower Manhattan this spring, Trump was reportedly disappointed that his supporters did not flock to the area around the courthouse. He made excuses when reporters pointed out that the park across the street was practically empty. "Thousands of people were turned away from the courthouse," he lied, calling the area "an armed camp to keep people away." I pulled out my cameraphone to show how easy it was to visit the neighborhood, and told New Yorkers to come see for themselves. But Trump's repeated claims that you shouldn't believe your own eyes have been buttressed by his near-decade-long insistence that real news is "fake." A Trump devotee would have a hard time trusting my photo of the wide-open courthouse entrance over Trump's comforting lie. I have come to view this as a method of control. The rejection of video evidence, the dismissal of photo proof, even the new lie invoking AI -- these claims all leave people arguing over the most basic tenets of reality, and cause some people to give up and give in. As Chico Marx asked in the 1933 film Duck Soup, "Who are ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?" Richard Pryor later adapted the line: "Who you gonna believe? Me, or your lying eyes?" Trump has brought the concept into the 21st century. Some of his photo-denying disputes have been minor, and maybe even humorous. One day in 2019, The Washington Post reported that Trump's advisers "wrote new talking points and handed him reams of opposition research" for his attacks against the Democratic lawmakers known as the "squad." Trump claimed that "there were no talking points" even though a Post photographer, Jabin Botsford, had taken a close-up photo of his prepared notes. Every instance of Trump disputing the indisputable is revealing in its own way. As Hurricane Dorian sideswiped the Eastern Seaboard, in the fall of 2019, Trump contradicted his own government's weather maps and claimed that Alabama was in the path of the hurricane when the state was not, then tried to convince people that his faulty forecast was correct. That same year, as Britain's Prince Andrew was ensnared in sexual-misconduct allegations, Trump said "I don't know him, no," despite multiple photos of the two men together, including one taken just six months before. Vulnerability seems to be the through line here -- whether Trump is at risk of trivial embarrassment, criminal exposure, or being caught in lies. A public figure with truth on their side would say Roll the tape to show they're right. Trump, instead, says, Don't believe the tape. Just believe me instead. The aftermath of January 6 is probably the most extreme example of his reality-denial. He watched the insurrection unfold on live TV but then tried to erase the public's memory of the images. On the one-year anniversary of the attack, Representative Jamie Raskin said on CNN that he felt bad for Trump adherents because "they are essentially in a political religious cult, and their cult leader, Donald Trump, is telling them they can't believe their own eyes, the evidence of their own experience, and their own ears." That's what Trump did again yesterday -- only this time, the proliferation of AI-image-making tools made it easier than ever to sow doubt. Trump is "entering the 'nothing is true and everything is possible' phase, as predicted," the Atlantic contributor Renee DiResta wrote on Threads. "The ability to plausibly cast doubt on the real is the unintended consequence of being able to generate unreality." King, one of the real people in the Michigan crowd that Trump said didn't exist, found the new crowd-size lie dispiriting. "It would be nice for us voters to be able to have discussions on the substantive issues that are at stake in this election," he told me, "not be hyperfocused on distractions and conspiracy theories." Yes -- but it is also essential to track how Trump tries to trick people. His is a campaign of disbelief. If Trump is so shaken by Harris that he will insist her thousands of supporters don't exist, what else will he say and do to deny reality?