U.S. President Donald Trump flooded social media with AI-generated images and claimed he had earned the United States hundreds of billions of dollars through stocks and other assets. He offered no specific evidence to support the claim.
Trump posted a stream of AI-generated images and other content on his social platform Truth Social over roughly 10 hours on the 6th, U.S. business outlet CNBC reported on the 7th.
One image showed Trump reviewing the stock market on multiple monitors at the White House. "I am working for America, not for personal gain," he wrote, adding that he had "made hundreds of billions of dollars for the country through stocks and various assets." CNBC reported that no specific basis was provided to verify the figure.
The Trump administration has booked substantial paper gains on at least one corporate stake. The U.S. government acquired about 10% of chipmaker Intel in August last year, and the White House said in May that the holding was worth more than $50 billion. That alone falls well short of explaining the hundreds of billions of dollars in gains Trump claimed, according to CNBC.
Trump's posts also included numerous AI images targeting Iran, which is at war with the United States. One showed a hammer painted with the Stars and Stripes smashing down on a map of Iran, another showed him watching ships explode from a warship. He also posted economic charts purporting to show the collapse of Iran's currency, though CNBC said it could not identify verifiable sources for them.
Experts said U.S. and Israeli military operations have damaged Iran's economy and sent prices soaring, but cautioned against concluding that the economy has entered an immediate collapse.
Trump also shared a large number of AI images carrying political and symbolic messages. Among them were depictions of him riding on horseback alongture George Washington, the first U.S. president, and of actor Robert De Niro holding a shirt reading "Trump is my president." Other images marked the Strait of Hormuz as U.S. territory and placed the Stars and Stripes beside the moon to assert American ownership.
The posts come amid scrutiny of how Trump's remarks move financial markets and of Truth Social's business model. Trump Media, the operator of Truth Social and owned by Trump, runs a paid service called Truth API that rapidly delivers posts from major accounts to financial firms and other clients.
Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff asked the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in July to investigate whether the service violates federal securities laws, saying it could give some financial firms faster access to information than ordinary investors. Trump Media says the service merely delivers already-public posts with reduced transmission delay.
