From playing football in the Oval Office to sipping cocktails on a sun lounger in Gaza and attacking critics from a fighter jet, Donald Trump has become the first US president to deploy AI-generated imagery as a key tool of political communications.In the first year of his second term in the White House, Trump ramped up his use of hyper-realistic but fabricated visuals on Truth Social and other platforms, often glorifying himself while lampooning his critics.Underscoring the strategy’s potential appeal to younger voters, similar AI-driven messaging has also been adopted by other arms of the Trump administration as well as by some of the president’s rivals.One of Trump’s posts depicts him playing football on the Oval Office’s carpeted floor with Cristiano Ronaldo, whom he describes as a “GREAT GUY” who is “really smart and cool.”Another AI post features Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sunbathing at a lavish resort, with “Trump Gaza” emblazoned on a sign in the background.The clip followed Trump’s proposal last year to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” a suggestion that sparked widespread outrage. Trump or the White House have similarly shared AI-made images showing the president dressed as the pope, roaring alongside a lion, and conducting an orchestra at the Kennedy Center, a prestigious arts complex.”Welcome to the United States’ first White House administration to embrace and use imagery generated by artificial intelligence in everyday communication,” said a report by the nonprofit media institute Poynter.”With AI, Trump quickly deploys stereotypes and false narratives in entertaining posts that memorably distill complicated issues into their basest political talking points, regardless of factual basis.”- ‘Capture attention’ -Trump has reserved the most provocative AI posts for his rivals and critics, using them to rally his conservative base.Last year, he posted an AI video of former president Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office and appearing behind bars in an orange jumpsuit.Later, he posted an AI clip of House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries — who is Black — wearing a fake mustache and a sombrero. Jeffries slammed the image as racist.”For someone like Trump, unregulated generative AI is the perfect tool to capture attention and distort reality,” Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at the advocacy group Free Press, told AFP.”Obama was never arrested in the Oval Office. But calling Trump out for telling this lie won’t phase him or his followers. A leader who lies without any truth testing means that facts are contingent on Trump’s approval.”- ‘Nonstop political campaign’ -Analysts say the AI messaging amounts to a strategy of campaigning through trolling, a tactic that could resonate with voters ahead of this year’s midterm elections.”While it would in many ways be desirable for the president to stay above the fray and away from sharing AI-generated images, Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he sees his time in office as a nonstop political campaign,” Joshua Tucker, co-director of the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics, told AFP.”We should simply see his use of AI-generated political images as just one of many tools — his text- based social media posts often being another — he uses to continue this campaign.”In a study published last month by the scientific journal Nature, academics including Cornell University’s David Rand reported that human-AI dialogues may have a substantive effect on voters’ electoral decisions.Back-and-forth exchanges with AI tools advocating for political candidates shifted opposition voters’ preferences substantially in the United States, Canada and Poland, the study said.In a sign of its potency, Trump’s AI strategy has been mimicked by other departments of his administration and his critics.Trump’s health chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr — under fire over medical misinformation — recently promoted a “Make Santa Healthy Again” Christmas campaign using an AI video while the US  Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deployed AI imagery in its immigration crackdown.Last month, California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, trolled the president by posting an AI video on X depicting Trump and two senior administration officials in handcuffs.”It’s cuffing season,” the video declared.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr has long been known for vaccine skepticism and fringe views that bled into conspiracy — ideology he is now baking into the US public health system.In only a year since Donald Trump returned to the White House, experts say his health secretary’s reforms have stoked confusion over longstanding medical advice and diminished the global standing of US institutions, with potential ripple effects for decades.”The impact is real. The impact is certainly being seen across the board. And I think the scariest part is, we’re only in the first year,” epidemiologist Syra Madad told AFP.Former Democrat Kennedy — who allied with Trump after his own 2024 presidential campaign sputtered — has mostly won praise from his “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement.But he has sparked outrage among medical groups, and some Republicans, with moves that have sown doubt about long-proven vaccine safety, slashed research funding, and weakened disease prevention programs, even as the US experiences its worst measles outbreak in years.Kennedy stacked a key immunization advisory panel with figures whose anti-vaccine sentiment mirrors his own, and overhauled the pediatric schedule of shots to recommend fewer.”I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown professor who has worked in public health law and policy for decades.Kennedy governs “through hunch, instinct and social media, not through science,” Gostin told AFP.At a recent event celebrating the rollout of new federal dietary guidelines, Kennedy told a crowd of supporters that “trusting the experts is not a feature of science” but rather “a feature of tyranny.””People in authority lie,” the government official continued, adding that people must act as “the CEOs of our own health.”The sentiment is part of a broad effort to not only sow distrust but to prioritize “individual choice” over “population protection,” said Madad, who is the biopreparedness officer for New York’s municipal health and hospitals network.- ‘Dysfunctional’ -MAHA adherents have broadly praised Kennedy’s initial efforts.And some public health advocates have found cautious optimism in a limited number of federal health priorities, even if they criticized the methods. Trump and Kennedy have sought to strike deals with pharma companies, urging them to voluntarily lower common drug prices along with appetite-suppressing medications.And in a rare alignment with mainstream scientific consensus, the administration vowed to remove synthetic dyes from food — primarily through voluntary compliance from industry.But Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group said he doesn’t see such strategies panning out.”There’s a graveyard of voluntary industry initiatives that shows that handshake agreements and industry commitments are no better than the paper they’re written on,” Faber told AFP.In the case of food coloring, Faber said those agreements were made possible because the Republican-leaning West Virginia in 2025 enacted a broad ban on synthetic dyes, setting a new standard.Many nutritionists also met with enthusiasm new dietary guidelines that strongly discouraged added sugars and highly processed foods — though an endorsement of red meat and full-fat dairy along with vague advice on limiting alcohol triggered worry.Nutritionist Marion Nestle told AFP that within the wider political context, such advice carries less weight.”Eating real food is not going to make America healthy again in the face of a public health system that is completely dysfunctional,” she told AFP.- ‘Generational trauma’ -Americans, especially parents, have been left with conflicting information and confusion.Pew Research Center polling showed 63 percent of Americans still have high confidence that childhood vaccines are effective at preventing severe illness. But it found uncertainty over safety testing, especially among Republicans.Rebuilding confidence in medical institutions could be difficult, Madad said.”This is going to be generational trauma.”Gostin said the United States has gone from a global leader in scientific innovation to a “laughingstock.””It’s impossible to overstate how much our reputation is dropped.”Researchers, he said, are leaving the government, the country or even the field — potentially creating major gaps in the development pipeline for treatments of deadly diseases.”There’s every reason to have deep concerns about the future,” Gostin said.

Growing up in a rural, religious community in western Canada, Kyle McCarthy loved hockey, but once he came out at 19, he quit, convinced being openly gay and an active player was untenable.So the 32-year-old says he is “very surprised” by the runaway success of “Heated Rivalry,” a Canadian-made series about the romance between two closeted gay players in a sport that has historically made gay men feel unwelcome.Ben Baby, the 43-year-old commissioner of the Toronto Gay Hockey Association (TGHA), calls the success of the show — which has catapulted its young lead actors to stardom — “shocking,” and says viewers have bought into its authentic portrait of a relationship.McCarthy and Baby are not alone — “Heated Rivalry” is a veritable cultural phenomenon. The show, an adaptation of a series of hockey-themed queer romance novels by Rachel Reid, charts the budding careers and secret relationship of two young hockey stars — one Canadian, one Russian — over a series of years.After premiering on the Canadian streaming platform Crave in late November, the series hit HBO Max and took off, becoming one of its most popular shows by Christmas.Variety called it “the biggest TV surprise” of 2025, and the show has even reportedly drawn a massive audience in China, where fans are watching pirated episodes.The stars, Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams, were unknown, struggling actors before being cast.Now, they are being mobbed by fans, joining A-listers on red carpets like at the Golden Globes, and have made their late night talk show debuts.”Our expectations were kind of nonexistent,” Storrie said on the Globes red carpet.”For it to turn out so good and also go on HBO and be involved in this level is unreal.”- ‘Toxic, homophobic’ -Writing in Maclean’s magazine in December, Reid — who is Canadian — said the novels were inspired by her “lifelong love of hockey, but also an awareness of the problems with the sport’s culture more broadly.””I thought a lot about how difficult it would be to be a closeted pro player.”For McCarthy, hockey was his first love — until it wasn’t.”My brother played, my sister played, my dad coached us all,” he told AFP. “Hockey was 100 percent of my life.”But by age 12, as he began to realize he was gay, McCarthy became uncomfortable in a sport he said had a “toxic, homophobic” culture.Quitting hockey at 19 “was awful,” he said.”I love the game and didn’t want to walk away from it,” he said. But his gear sat unused in his garage “for eight, nine years.”Then he reconnected with the sport through a Vancouver-based LGBTQ+ hockey association now called The Cutting Edges, where he is president. – ‘Safe space’ -Baby grew up in the northern Ontario city of Timmins, which, like many small Canadian communities, has a deeply rooted hockey culture.He told AFP he feared playing as a child, because he “instinctively” knew it “wouldn’t have been a safe space.”After moving to Toronto as a teenager in the late 90s and discovering the TGHA, Baby took up the sport.Hockey has made advances toward being more inclusive over the last 20 years, he said, but noted progress has been uneven.He said the NHL’s decision in 2023 to ban the use of rainbow-colored Pride tape on sticks was a “fiasco.”The league ultimately rescinded the ban due to player and public outrage.- Broader impact? -The NHL is alone among the so-called Big Four male professional sports leagues with no active or retired players who have come out as gay.Luke Prokop, a prospect drafted in 2020 who is gay, has not yet appeared in an NHL game.For McCarthy, the absence of an openly gay NHL player is “100 percent” due to persistent issues with hockey culture.Baby nevertheless credited the NHL with quieter efforts to make LGBT fans feel welcome and applauded the league’s apparent embrace of “Heated Rivalry.””There are so many ways to get hooked on hockey and, in the NHL’s 108-year history, this might be the most unique driver for creating new fans,” the league said last month.Baby noted that popular podcasts hosted by “straight hockey bros” are offering commentary on each episode.”Queer characters are often flat, one-sided and stereotypical,” but the leads in “Heated Rivalry” are “complex,” he said.”They’re rich, they’re interesting. They’re the antidote to stereotypes.”Asked whether he believed “Heated Rivalry” could make hockey more welcoming for the LGBTQ community, McCarthy said: “I hope it can, I don’t know that it will.”