Experts warn that Trump’s AI fakery in Iran will destroy public trust: ‘Breaking our shared reality’

T he footage is convincing. Shot as though from the open door of a military helicopter, it shows oil storage tanks and refinery infrastructure erupting in sequence, smoke stacking into a night sky — the camera juddering the way real gun-camera video shakes.

The caption read "Kharg Island being blown to smithereens." It was signed, as the president signs his official posts, "President DJT."

There was just one problem — it was completely fake, an AI-generated fantasy put forward as part of the running show of slop that characterizes President Donald Trump ’s output on the social media site he owns.

Yet the fact remained that Trump had posted the image at a time when the U.S. was conducting airstrikes in Iran , the first in weeks. He has teased strikes on that Iranian petroleum export facility on multiple times despite warnings that it could touch off a spiraling escalation that would cripple global oil markets and the world economy.

The imagery was so realistic — if not a bit too clean-looking — the Pentagon was forced to almost immediately explain that the president’s post was not a depiction of reality, as other images posted by Trump and his cabinet secretaries of actual air strikes have been.

A Defense Department official said Kharg Island — which handles the overwhelming majority of the country's crude exports — was not among the targets struck overnight.

Meanwhile, the head of the National Iranian Oil Company called the post "laughable" and said conditions on the island were "calm and appropriate."

In short, the Pentagon was forced to spend part of Monday in the position of formally denying that American forces had bombed something the American commander in chief had just said they bombed.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on whether the president had intended the video as a threat or as a misdirection of some sort.

But conflicts between the president and the government he leads when it comes to clearly verifiable facts is nothing new. Trump has done this before with far lower stakes.

In September 2019, Trump told the public that Alabama was likely to be hit "much harder than anticipated" by Hurricane Dorian.

The National Weather Service office in Birmingham corrected him within about 20 minutes, telling Alabamians they would see no impacts from the storm. Three days later the president displayed a NOAA forecast map in the Oval Office on which the projected cone had been extended, in black Sharpie marker, to cover Alabama.

And two days after that, NOAA's headquarters issued an unsigned statement siding with the president and rebuking its own Birmingham forecasters. Subsequent reviews found that statement had been produced under political pressure and violated the agency's scientific-integrity rules.

The whole episode, dubbed “Sharpiegate,” was mocked as farce at the time.