Creepy deepfake images of Trump being arrested serve up red meat for salivating haters

It remains to be seen whether the walls have finally closed in around former President Donald J. Trump but a creepy collection of deepfake images have been spreading across social media to feed the fantasies of those who are salivating over the prospect that he will soon be arrested.

On Wednesday, a day when the New York City grand jury unexpectedly canceled deliberations on whether to bring an indictment against the former president, dozens of the AI-generated images of Trump being hauled in by the NYPD spread across Twitter.

The creepily realistic fakery was promoted by Twitter user Eliot Higgins, the founder of the website Bellingcat, a go-to source for media that often cites its content in stories that are primarily concerned with foreign policy and, in addition to the images of the ex-POTUS struggling as he is subdued by police, show a distraught former first lady Melania Trump as well as the 2024 GOP presidential frontrunner behind bars in an orange jumpsuit.

“Making pictures of Trump getting arrested while waiting for Trump’s arrest,” wrote Higgins in the first of the plethora of phony images that he posted to the platform as the so-called Resistance anxiously awaited the announcement from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office.

Another deepfake posted by Higgins shows Trump lunging at a police officer.

Additional images of Trump’s “arrest” as conjured by the Midjourney v5 engine used to create the scenes.

Melania and Don Jr. are also featured in Higgins’ fantasy world.

Disgraced former lawyer Michael Cohen and porn star Stormy Daniels – both heroes of the establishment media – also make an appearance.

A good number of the images show Trump in various poses in captivity, a fate that opposition party leaders would typically face if they ran afoul of the likes of Vladimir Putin, an irony that was apparently lost on their creator.

Higgins also posted a ChatGPT 4 fairy tale he called the “Trumpshank Redemption,” a reference to the classic prison escape flick “The Shawshank Redemption,” the big screen treatment of the Stephen King novella starring Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins.

“The Trump arrest image was really just casually showing both how good and bad Midjourney was at rendering real scenes, like the first image has Trump with three legs and a police belt,” Higgins said, claiming that he didn’t think that the images would be taken seriously by those who viewed them.

“I had assumed that people would realize Donald Trump has two legs, not three, but that appears not to have stopped some people passing them off as genuine, which highlights that lack of critical thinking skills in our educational system,” he added, according to the New York Post.

Bragg’s grand jury is set to reconvene on Thursday with Trump’s fate – and the reputation of the USA as a free country – hanging in the balance.

Chris Donaldson

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