Corey Alpert

Well, first of all, Donald Trump, I think, does see himself in a similar sort of social position.

Certainly amongst his followers, he sees himself as this savior figure.

You saw very similar visuals and rhetoric coming out, especially after the assassination attempt in 2024.

And you've seen the Trump team use these AI generated images over the last couple of years, not so much to convince people that this image is necessarily true, but to give them this feeling, this sense of something that might be true.

And for a long time, it's galvanized.

You look at the AI-generated images from the lie about immigrants from Haiti eating dogs and cats that they were using AI-generated images for.

The followers really bought into.

And this might actually be the first time that Donald Trump's supporters are looking at one of these images and saying that it's going too far and that he has crossed a moral line in how he's positioning himself.

Oh, of course.

And this is par for the course for Donald Trump, that he realizes that something didn't work, that he went too far, and he's saying that he didn't mean it or that an intern posted or whatever the excuse of the day is.

It's already out there.

Donald Trump doesn't think through things behind the scenes.

We see how he makes decisions in real time.

And that's how he's been for his entire public life.

There is no sort of machination behind the scenes where he's thinking about this at that higher level, that he's the Red Cross personified as Jesus.

No, he or someone on his team put something in an AI image generator that said, make

Trump-Jesus saving these people.

And then they posted it.

And then they had to deal with the consequences.

There isn't some sort of backroom thinking with some moral philosopher in all of this.