Just before noon on a holiday weekend, while many Americans were at the beach, President Trump’s social media account roared to life. In what has increasingly become his weekend habit, he unleashed a daylong barrage of posts that put the bully in the modern bully pulpit.
There were images of Mr. Trump intimidating Canada’s prime minister with a hockey stick, personally bombing enemy targets and patrolling dark streets with killer robots. There were maps showing the United States taking over other countries, and maps renaming a state. There were attacks on the “Dumocratic Party” and tributes to himself as “the Greatest President of All Time!”
The 60 messages posted online over 10 hours and 41 minutes offered a window into Mr. Trump’s own unique reality, one anchored not in fact but in an expression of ego. For years, his social media feed was said to be a mirror of his id. But with A.I., it has become the manifestation of how he wants to be seen in a more visual, visceral way than ever before — as a warrior, as a conqueror, as a historical figure, as a younger and thinner and more muscular version of himself.
In Mr. Trump’s digitally enhanced version of the world, he is a giant in every way, a man who defeats every adversary, overcomes every obstacle and sinks every putt. He not only redraws the map of the world but vanquishes the heavens themselves. “The Moon Is Ours,” declared one post last weekend with an image of the earth’s only satellite. Another posted a few weeks ago showed him leading an extraterrestrial alien in shackles.
The rat-a-tat of ever wilder, ever more outrageous posts each weekend has become a fixture of the president’s second term, seen more and more as a barometer of his mental state. Mr. Trump’s critics, who never considered him a model of stability in the first place, now point to these frenetic bursts of fantasy and vanity as proof that the 80-year-old president is deteriorating further with age.
It is a measure of how much Mr. Trump has changed the nature of the presidency that any of this has become routine. Past presidents believed they had a duty to carry themselves with a certain dignity befitting the office. Mr. Trump sees politics like the wrestling cage match he sponsored this summer at the White House.
Indeed, the images he posted over the Labor Day weekend included one with his face on Hulk Hogan’s rippling body. Another posted a day later imagined a grinning Mr. Trump easily winning an arm wrestling match against Mr. Hogan, the flamboyant wrestling star who died last year.
“He floods the zone with so much of it that we’ve become numb to just how bizarre it is,” said Sarah Matthews, Mr. Trump’s former deputy White House press secretary. “An 80-year-old president is spending a ridiculous amount of time consuming and reposting endless A.I. fan fiction portraying him as the biggest, strongest and most important person alive. It feels like we’re genuinely watching his brain rot in real time.”
To his defenders, Mr. Trump is a master of baiting his adversaries, getting them to react. “It’s called: We do a little trolling,” as Mr. Trump once put it. The more out there the message is, the more his supporters cheer. As abnormal as the images that he posts may be for a president, Mr. Trump’s allies argue that they convey a certain raw, earthy quality that suits an age of no-holds-barred politics.
“With all due respect, the media and President Trump’s other critics have spent more than a decade complaining about his use of social media,” said Alex Bruesewitz, a former campaign aide. “They keep calling it ‘unpresidential,’ but if the president is doing it, it is presidential by definition. I think most Americans appreciate the authentic and transparent way he uses these platforms.”
Violence is a recurring theme in Mr. Trump’s feed. He relishes the idea of himself as a tough man staring down anyone who gets in his way. He smashes Iran with a giant hammer. He pilots a spacecraft blasting the planet. Most arresting was his post last weekend showing him in a hockey uniform with a stick towering over a fallen Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada and taunting, “Get up, Governor,” as if Canada really were the 51st state that he says he wants to make it. That one, unsurprisingly, further inflamed international tensions.
As Mr. Trump surely knew it would. It is hard to imagine any other president picturing himself physically assaulting the leader of an ally. But for Mr. Trump, who has been unable to force Mr. Carney to back down in a tariff fight, the cartoonish image allows him to present himself as winning even when he is not.
Never mind that he may cry foul if anyone else were to picture him as the target of violence. Goaded by Mr. Trump, the Justice Department indicted James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, for a social media post showing seashells spelling out the numbers “86 47,” interpreting the image as a threat to the president.
“This is truly unhinged behavior from the President of the United States,” Representative Chellie Pingree, a Maine Democrat, wrote online after the Carney post. “And I don’t want to hear ‘oh, it’s just Trump being Trump’ or that he’s ‘trolling.’ Enough. None of this is normal or okay. Republicans cannot keep shrugging this off. Congress, the Cabinet, and everyone around him has a responsibility to stop enabling this dangerous behavior and start asking whether he is fit to hold this office.”
The White House shrugged off the criticism. “Truth Social is the most powerful and popular social media platform in the world because it serves as President Trump’s authentic voice, where he communicates directly with the American people and the world without the biased media taking him out of context,” Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, said in a statement, using the name of the president’s social media platform.
In fact, by traditional measures, Truth Social is nowhere near as popular as major social media platforms like Facebook or X and its traffic has slumped since last year. But it has effectively become the town hall for Mr. Trump’s MAGA followers and therefore plays an outsize role in American politics. Either posting himself or approving posts crafted by aides, Mr. Trump uses it as his main outlet for presidential messages to the world.
Last Sunday was a striking day on Truth Social but increasingly typical of the president’s weekend blitzes, when he has fewer staff members around him and more unscheduled time. While at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., Mr. Trump started posting at 11:54 a.m. and kept returning to his account in staccato bursts throughout the day. At 1:47 p.m., he posted six messages within two minutes. From 2:40 p.m. to 3:43 p.m., he circulated another 27 posts. He continued through the evening, only letting up after his final one of the night at 10:35 p.m.
They were the kinds of posts that are common on the internet, just not normally from a head of state — impertinent, insulting, scornful, belligerent and sometimes out-and-out wacky. They offered a Rorschach test for followers, funny to those who admire what they see as Mr. Trump’s wry sense of humor, delusional to those who think he has lost his mind.
As with Canada, his many posts on Iran that day portrayed his war as he would like it to be, not how it really is. In the actual Middle East outside of his control, Mr. Trump is stuck in a quagmire with no clear end in sight. In the virtual Middle East of his own creation, Mr. Trump is a triumphal commander in chief bludgeoning Iran into submission.
The flurry of posts last weekend included an image of a bomber attacking with the caption “Bye bye, Kharg,” referring to the Iranian island, and a map showing the Strait of Hormuz labeled “New U.S. Territory.” Another featured supposed before-and-after maps of Iran with the latter showing the country in the shape of Mr. Trump’s own wavy-haired profile.
Maps, in fact, were big with Mr. Trump as he played with his phone that day. He posted a map of the north half of the Western Hemisphere showing the U.S. flag superimposed on Canada, Mexico, Greenland, Iceland, Cuba and all of Central America and the Caribbean islands, all under the label “United States of America.”
Canada, Mexico and Greenland have gotten used to this sort of provocation, but Iceland was shocked to be included, and summoned the U.S. ambassador to complain. “There is nothing funny or normal about making fun of the sovereignty of states,” Prime Minister Kristrun Frostadottir of Iceland told reporters.
Even as he showcased his imperialist ambitions abroad, Mr. Trump asserted his authoritarian instincts at home, posting multiple maps and images of him peremptorily renaming the state of New Mexico as “New America,” something he has no power to do. As with the Icelanders, the New Mexicans were not amused. “Oh hell no!” Representative Melanie Stansbury, a Democrat, wrote online.
While Mr. Trump’s posts regularly influence domestic politics and foreign policy, he also uses A.I. to promote grandiose visions of himself as a superhero, a pope and at one point last spring a Jesus-like figure. Last weekend’s posts included one that he has circulated before offering his own chart ranking American presidents, with him, naturally, at the top as “The Greatest.” Another post asserted: “He Will Go Down In History As the Greatest President of All Time!”
Mr. Trump, who avoided the draft during the Vietnam War with a diagnosis of bone spurs provided by a doctor who was one of his father’s tenants, particularly enjoys presenting himself as a martial hero.
In an image posted last month, Mr. Trump wore the military uniform that he never wore in real life standing between Generals George S. Patton and Douglas MacArthur. George Washington has become a regular guest in Mr. Trump’s world lately. Sunday’s burst included images of him with the father of the country on horseback and in the Oval Office.
The advent of A.I. has allowed Mr. Trump to go further than the mainly written social media posts of his first term. “Trump has always treated social media as a window into whatever he is thinking at that moment, but A.I. makes that window far more vivid and frankly more disturbing,” said Ms. Matthews, his former press aide. “And it feels like the more difficult reality gets for him, the more A.I. slop he posts.”
Mr. Bruesewitz, the former campaign aide, called Mr. Trump an innovator who is paving the way to the future of politics. “President Trump is the first true social media president,” he said. “He has always adapted to the times, using new technology and platforms to take his message straight to the public. His A.I. posts generate enormous attention whenever he hits send.”
No one would debate that they are attention generators. One way or another, that seems to be the point.
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