WWhen future historians look back and try to understand just how strange the politics of 2025 were, a useful time to revisit will be early July.
It was shortly after Elon Musk's acrimonious break with the White House and accusations that Trump was included in Epstein's files that he observed his Grok AI anti-“woke” chatbot begin calling itself “Mecha-Hitler” and praising the genocidal leader.
xAI quickly moved to delete comments and ban posts of hate speech, but the aggressive tirade against its flagship product by one of the country's richest and most politically connected figures captured the fast-paced and often confusing landscape in which politics and AI will collide in 2025.
From top to bottom, AI has influenced everything about national politics this year, from the president's high-stakes trade negotiations with China to the detailed ways Americans communicate and distinguish fact from fiction.
(AI) A picture is worth a thousand words
No one in politics was more enthusiastic about introducing AI than Donald Trump. Building on early experiments in his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump has turned AI into an in-house “propaganda” factory, churning out countless, often outrageous, digital images to promote his policies and mock his opponents.
Accounts associated with the president, immigration officials, and other government officials now publish AI-generated images and videos on an almost daily basis, but perhaps none was more shocking than a September post in which President Trump said: Apocalypse now-The White House styles itself as a general who “declares war” on Chicago as the target of its next immigration crackdown.
“Chicago is about to find out why it's called the Department of War,” the Truth Social post read, a striking message of aggression from American leaders toward American cities.
Mike Anany, an associate professor of communications and journalism at the University of Southern California, said the sharing of these images at the highest levels suggests a new political paradigm is underway. Getting arrested for using doctored or fake images used to be shameful and prohibited. Not so anymore.
“There's no sense of, 'Oh, I got caught using a composite image,'” he said. independent person. “All the gloves are off. People don't seem to care.”
Republicans weren't the only ones riding this trend.
California Governor Gavin Newsom is now using AI images of himself to hit back at MAGA crowds almost daily, as part of a recent pivot to Trump-style online trolling tactics. That includes a recent December post from the “Handcuffs” season that showed Trump, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth handcuffed to the tune of 2022. saturday night live sketch.
The same dynamic movement using AI was also deployed in high-profile local elections, such as the extremely competitive New York mayoral race. There, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's campaign briefly released and then deleted an AI video featuring false testimony from his opponent, “Criminal Zoran Mamdani,” prompting criticism that the former governor was playing on racist stereotypes. (The campaign later said the video had been posted by mistake by a “lower-level official.”)
Trump and AI trading technology
Artificial intelligence has been at the heart of the White House's agenda at home and abroad since the first moments of the Trump administration, which began with big AI-related tech companies making huge donations on Inauguration Day.
Domestically, AI drove much of Trump's economic strategy.
To continue the boom in AI investment, the White House is pushing for landmark environmental law exemptions like the National Environmental Policy Act to accelerate data center construction, while President Trump signed an executive order in December that blocks states from implementing their own patchwork AI regulations. The administration is also touting the Stargate project by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank to direct hundreds of billions of dollars to domestic AI investment.
In Washington, Mr. Musk, at least before his break with Mr. Trump, was reportedly using AI to scrutinize government contracts and cut regulations as part of an unprecedented slash-and-burn DOGE effort to cut government spending.
Meanwhile, lobbying firms raised nearly $100 million working on AI-related issues in the first three quarters of 2025, with millions more spent on internal efforts by top Big Tech companies, according to Bloomberg Government estimates.
Silicon Valley has trended more liberal in recent decades, and the Trump movement has long criticized tech companies for censorship allegations, but the beginning of the AI era and the inauguration of President Trump II seemed to signal a détente in political tensions between Big Tech and MAGA.
Big AI companies are among the major funders of the president's $400 million White House banquet project, and the president said in October that a call from Jensen Huang, CEO of major AI chipmaker Nvidia, was part of what convinced him not to send a large army of agents to San Francisco for the kind of immigration crackdown that besieged many other Democratic-led cities across the country last year.
Overseas, major U.S. technology and AI companies, whether it's the U.S. companies that committed billions of dollars in investment and hardware as part of September's U.S.-UK “Technology Prosperity Deal,” or the Trump administration's use of access to top U.S. AI chips as a negotiating tool. It had a way of engaging in important diplomatic moves, such as allowing the sale of inferior NVIDIA chips to enemy countries such as China, while allowing top-of-the-line equipment to be sent to friendly countries like both countries, as long as the United States received a 25% tax break. United Arab Emirates (UAE), where the Trump family has significant business interests.
Fake phone calls, “glow fakes” And the structure of reality is torn apart
While AI is rapidly increasing productivity in fields from coding to medical discovery, the technology has also quickly injected further doubt into an already fractured political moment, where Americans (including the president) regularly dismiss facts as fake news and believe clearly false information.
Beyond the Mecha-Hitler incident, Grok has appeared numerous times to align with its creator's right-wing politics, despite Musk's claims that AI chatbots seek truth and are aimed at external political pressure.
In May, Grok began repeatedly bringing up “white genocide,” which does not exist in Musk's native South Africa, telling users they were “directed by my creator” to accept the genocide as “real and racially motivated.” (The company blamed this response on someone making “unauthorized changes” to the Grok code.)
In June, Musk promised to correct Grok for “parroting legacy media” by presenting accurate data showing that right-wing political violence has become more prevalent than left-wing attacks in recent decades.
AI has also obscured reality by providing tricksters and U.S. adversaries alike with easy access to sophisticated impersonation tools.
In July, an impostor reportedly used a fake AI voice to impersonate Secretary of State Marco Rubio and contacted senior U.S. government officials and foreign ministers.
Authorities believe the scammers were trying to deceive officials “with the aim of gaining access to information and accounts,” diplomatic cables said. washington postsays.
Daniel S. Schiff, co-director of Purdue University's Governance and Responsible AI Lab, worked with a team of researchers to catalog the various ways AI deepfakes are being used for political persuasion. This includes “fanfakes,” which are unrealistic and positive AI tributes to political figures, to darkfakes, and very realistic and negative depictions of political figures. In fact, the most popular type was fanfakes, according to an analysis of the 2024 election.
Schiff said. independent person While there were countless ways in which AI could actively improve political intelligence, such as making it easier to search and analyze historical facts and political data, industry and public attention was far more focused on quickly using modern tools.
“Hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested in innovation, but a small portion of that is being invested in safety and responsible approaches,” he said.
The course of the AI battle is charted for 2026
Given the deep skepticism that many Americans feel about AI, artificial intelligence will likely be as important a political issue in 2026 as it was in 2025.
Silicon Valley companies have poured more than $100 million into a network of political action committees and organizations to protect the midterm industry, but political commentators argue that both political parties could benefit from responding to Americans' concerns about the new technology.
“One of the big questions heading into 2026 is which political party will speak for the American people who hate the intrusion of AI into their lives and want its scope to be limited,” Michelle Goldberg writes in a recent paper. new york times editorial.
“We will soon begin to see not only how much AI will reshape democracy, but also how much democracy remains.”
