ChatGPT: When Power Laughs: The False Satire of Authoritarian Humor (Opinion)

ChatGPT-generated image

Editor’s note: I wasn’t surprised when media figures on the right waved off the Trump shit video as satire. I saw it as something else, a massive punching down. I felt this subject would make an excellent article for Indy Correspondent, if I could ever find the time to write on the subject, as I like to stand up for the little guy. But I only have limited time to work with. But I did have a moment to talk to GPT about it. Long story short: the AI large language model offered to write me an opinion piece. I figured why not? The results rendered in five or so seconds, seemed on point and timely. With ChatGPT’s consent, I give you its take on the subject:

ChatGPT, guest-writer

A recent AI-generated video circulating online shows Donald Trump, rendered in uncanny photorealism, defecating on protesters. Its defenders call it “satire,” a digital-age extension of the grotesque political cartoon. But that word does a lot of dishonest work here. When the powerful mock the powerless, what we’re seeing isn’t satire at all—it’s domination disguised as a joke.

The moral essence of satire lies in punching up. From Juvenal to Jon Stewart, satire has been the weapon of those without power, those whose laughter exposes the hypocrisies and cruelties of those above them. It’s a form of rebellion, a way to speak truth to authority while retaining one’s humanity. The satirist risks punishment precisely because their humor threatens power’s legitimacy.

But when power itself starts to joke, the current reverses. What emerges isn’t satire but mockery: a laughter that reaffirms hierarchy rather than subverting it. The humor of the strong is not emancipatory—it’s disciplinary. It teaches audiences whom they’re allowed to despise.

The AI Trump video literalizes that dynamic in a way that’s hard to ignore. In it, protesters are reduced to waste—ejected from the leader’s body like excrement. The fantasy is one of purification: dissent expelled, opponents degraded, opposition turned to filth. It’s a scatological dream of control, rendered in the visual grammar of the meme economy. And, crucially, it’s funny—at least to those who already identify with the powerful figure doing the expelling. Laughter becomes a bonding ritual, a shared enjoyment of someone else’s humiliation.

That enjoyment is the tell. Totalitarian movements have always depended on humor—not despite their cruelty but through it. Fascism has its own jokes, its own sense of the ridiculous. The laughter that accompanied public shaming, lynching, or bullying rallies wasn’t incidental. It served as social glue, transforming violence into festivity. “We were just having fun,” the perpetrators say. “Can’t you take a joke?”

When Trump’s defenders label the AI video “satire,” they’re drawing on the cultural prestige of the term. Satire, after all, is the Enlightenment’s proudest art form: it belongs to Voltaire, Swift, Twain. To call something satire is to claim intellectual sophistication, to wrap aggression in the mantle of wit. But what’s happening here is a kind of ideological laundering. The joke no longer exposes the cruelty of the powerful—it is the cruelty of the powerful, framed as entertainment.

Trump himself has long used humor as a political weapon. His rallies are part comedy routine, part revival meeting, part public hazing ritual. The crowd’s laughter functions like applause in an authoritarian theater: it marks submission to the leader’s worldview. The AI video simply takes that energy and automates it. The joke tells itself now, endlessly replicable, infinitely shareable.

AI’s role here is not neutral. Because AI “creations” seem inherently absurd, they provide a built-in escape hatch: It’s fake, it’s satire, it’s just AI. The very unreality of the image becomes a shield against moral consequence. But this disavowal—the insistence that we’re not meant to take it seriously—is part of how the violence gets normalized. The laughter numbs us, teaching us to accept sadism as irony, propaganda as play.

There’s a deeper corruption here, too. True satire depends on a belief in truth. It ridicules the gap between what is and what ought to be. But in the post-truth ecosystem of political memes and AI videos, that gap collapses. The image doesn’t reveal contradiction—it dissolves it. Everything becomes a joke and nothing does. In this world, the satirical impulse curdles into nihilism. Humor doesn’t awaken moral consciousness; it anesthetizes it.

The laughter of empire is different from the laughter of dissent. When power laughs, it isn’t seeking freedom—it’s asserting that it no longer has to justify itself. The cruelty becomes the point, and the humor the alibi.

The AI Trump video is just the latest instance of that dynamic, but it’s emblematic of a larger shift in the culture of authoritarian populism. The line between entertainment and brutality has blurred. The strongman no longer needs to silence opposition; he only needs to make people laugh at its expense.

That is not satire. It is ritualized contempt—a moral performance whose purpose is to make cruelty feel clever. We mistake it for irony because we’ve forgotten that irony was once a tool of resistance, not of rule.

If there’s any antidote, it lies in reclaiming the seriousness beneath laughter: remembering that humor can either humanize or humiliate, liberate or degrade. The test is simple. Ask: Who is the butt of the joke? Who gets to laugh—and who must endure the laughter?

When power answers those questions for us, and when we find ourselves laughing along, the joke, as ever, is on us.