Ron DeSantis’s collapsing campaign has been attempting to peddle fake, AI-generated images of former President Donald J. Trump hugging and kissing Dr. Anthony Fauci. The incident comes just days after the DeSantis team launched a corporate media-inspired campaign to “fact check” Trump supporters on Twitter.
Shared by the DeSantis War Room social media account first set up by illegal immigrant supporter and DeSantis confidante Christina Pushaw, a new attack advert features a collage of six images of Trump with the former public health official captioned: “REAL LIFE TRUMP”.
Three of the six images depicting Trump hugging and even kissing Fauci, however, are not from “real life” at all, and represent a new weaponization of fake news against the 45th President.
Donald Trump became a household name by FIRING countless people *on television*
But when it came to Fauci… pic.twitter.com/7Lxwf75NQm
— DeSantis War Room 🐊 (@DeSantisWarRoom) June 5, 2023
The effort appears to be an attempt to deflect from DeSantis’s own troubling record with Fauci. On March 25th 2020, DeSantis heaped praise on then-Vice President Mike Pence’s COVID task force:
“You have a lot of people there who are working very, very hard, and they’re not getting a lot of sleep. And they’re really focusing on a big country that we have. And from Dr. Birx to Dr. Fauci to the vice president who’s worked very hard, the surgeon general, they’re really doing a good job. It’s a tough, tough situation, but they’re working hard.”
Indeed DeSantis made sure to single out Fauci, Birx, and Pence for praise – omitting Donald Trump since he knew at the time that Trump had deputized the COVID-19 response to Pence and his team.
Hany Farid, an expert in digital forensics, told the AFP that it was “sneaky to intermix what appears to be authentic photos with fake photos… three images are almost certainly AI generated.”