The Very Real Threat of Trump’s Deepfake
When people began talking about the political implications of deepfake technology—manipulating a video to transpose one person’s face on another’s body—they usually assumed that deepfakery would be deployed by some anonymous, hostile non-state actor, as a no-return-address, high-tech sabotage of democracy. Who imagined that the return address would be 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?
Yet it has happened.
April 26, 2020, was an especially manic day in the presidency of Donald Trump. The day might have been expected to be a personal and familial one: the 50th birthday of Trump’s present wife and the first lady of the United States. Yet something was gnawing at him. Perhaps his business troubles were Trump’s corporate income by something like three-quarters since mid-March. Or perhaps Trump was still seething at the widespread ridicule of his press conference of April 23, when he suggested using disinfectant “by injection.” Or perhaps something else had shifted his mood from its usual setting of to .
