The Origins of Totalitarianism: A Reading by Donald Trump

AI video and sound. 2024, 24:30mins

A “shallow fake” video of Donald Trump reading from Hannah Arendt’s seminal book The Origins of Totalitarianism. He reads Section One of Chapter 11, "The Totalitarian Movement: Totalitarian Propaganda." The video was created using readily available AI tools found online, including TopMediaAI for text-to-voice emulation, and Wav2Lip v5, a free-to-use open source software available through Google Colab..

In 2019, so called “deep fake” technologies were being reported with breathless concern over the rise of the capabilities towards subverting our experiences of the moving images in entertainment, news, and politics. It was sometime thereafter that I had the initial ideal to create a “deep-fake” video of Donald Trump, this was during Trump’s first term as President of the United States. The first concept was to have Trump do a reading from Guy DeBord’s Situationist classic text, “The Society of the Spectacle”. I chatted with some colleagues in computer science in early 2020 about how we might do this, we discussed training an AI model on various data, including voice and imagery. The pandemic soon hit and the complexity of the project and the difficulty of working remotely to produce such a complex project derailed any further efforts. When Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, I thought, this project, thankfully, has no need to exist. Wishful thinking I know!

It was with the re-emergence of Donald Trump as the Republican Party candidate for President in 2024 that this idea resurfaced. I thought, however, that “The Society of the Spectacle”, which was definitely an interesting first concept, was not longer as relevant. The unabashedly totalitarian and fascist leanings of Trump, the Republican Party, and Project 2025 that led me to reconsider how best to approach the work. It was in this rethinking of the concept that I decided to have Trump do a reading from Hannah Arendt’s highly influential 1951 book, “The Origins of Totalitarianism”. My concept was to create not a “deep fake” but perhaps a “shallow fake”, utilizing newly available, open source software options which have enabled me to realize the work, that is purposefully rough, revealing the processes of AI technology rather than celebrating them. After a month of production, the result is a nearly 25-minute-long video of Donald Trump reading from Chapter 11 "The Totalitarian Movement", Section I. "Totalitarian Propaganda".

The work was created by media artist and activist Joseph DeLappe. Special thanks to creative and technical consultants Dennis Delgado and Remy Pijuan.