Donald Trump has always used social media differently from almost any president before him.
But a former White House aide now says his latest behavior has crossed into something far more unsettling.
Sarah Matthews, who served as a deputy press secretary during Trump’s first administration, has publicly sounded the alarm over the 80-year-old president’s increasingly strange Truth Social habits — including a flood of AI-generated images portraying him as a superhero, a warrior and even the commander of robot armies.
Her assessment was brutal.
“It feels like we’re genuinely watching his brain rot in real time,” Matthews told The New York Times.
The comment came after Trump unleashed another extraordinary burst of posts over the weekend.
Among the images shared from his account was an AI-generated scene depicting Trump alongside a robotic military force launching what appeared to be a nuclear attack from space.
Another showed him threatening Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney with a hockey stick.
There was also an image of Trump’s face superimposed onto the famously muscular body of wrestling icon Hulk Hogan.
Other posts depicted the president smashing a representation of Iran with an enormous American-flag hammer and celebrating imagined military victories.
In isolation, any one of those images might be dismissed as political trolling.
Matthews argues the concern is the sheer volume — and the way Trump appears repeatedly drawn to fantastical images presenting himself as impossibly powerful.
“He floods the zone with so much of it that we’ve become numb to just how bizarre it is,” she said.
She described an 80-year-old president spending significant amounts of time consuming and sharing AI-created fantasies in which he is portrayed as the strongest and most important figure in the world.
Matthews’ criticism carries particular weight because she once worked inside Trump’s White House.
She resigned following the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and has since become an outspoken critic of her former boss.
Her comments do not amount to a medical diagnosis.
There is no publicly presented clinical evidence establishing that Trump’s social-media activity is proof of dementia, cognitive decline or another neurological condition.
But the behavior has nevertheless intensified a political argument that has followed Trump throughout his second presidency: whether his increasingly erratic public presentation should raise concerns about his fitness for office.
Democratic lawmakers have seized on the posts.
Rep. Chellie Pingree of Maine went so far as to raise the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment, which provides a constitutional mechanism for transferring presidential power if a president is unable to discharge the duties of the office.
“This is truly unhinged behavior from the President of the United States,” Pingree wrote while sharing a compilation of Trump’s posts.
She urged Republicans not to dismiss the activity as simply “Trump being Trump.”
The criticism became even more serious after one of Trump’s doctored maps triggered an international backlash.
The map showed the American flag covering Canada, Central America, parts of the Caribbean and Iceland.
Trump has previously joked or spoken provocatively about expanding U.S. territory, including acquiring Greenland and making Canada part of the United States.
But Icelandic officials did not treat the image as harmless.
The country’s foreign minister summoned U.S. Ambassador Billy Long for an explanation.
Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir condemned the image, arguing that another country’s sovereignty should not be treated as a joke.
That episode demonstrated why Trump’s online behavior matters beyond domestic political entertainment.
When the president of the United States shares an image, foreign governments cannot always know whether they are seeing satire, trolling, political messaging or a hint of actual policy.
Trump offered little context for many of the posts.
That ambiguity is part of what critics find disturbing.
The White House strongly rejected Matthews’ interpretation.
Spokesperson Davis Ingle defended Truth Social as the platform through which Trump speaks directly to the public without traditional media filters.
The administration’s position is that the president’s posting style reflects authenticity, not impairment.
Trump’s supporters have frequently made the same argument.
To them, provocative memes and exaggerated AI imagery are an extension of the political persona that helped Trump dominate media attention for more than a decade.
They see a president who understands internet culture and uses outrageous content deliberately to command the news cycle.
His critics see something else.
They point to the frequency, intensity and increasingly surreal nature of the posts and argue that presidential behavior should be judged differently from that of an ordinary social-media influencer.
The disagreement is unlikely to disappear.
And artificial intelligence has made the problem more complicated.
AI tools can now create convincing images of presidents doing things that never occurred.
That means a sitting president sharing fictional military victories, territorial maps or violent imagery can blur the line between parody and official communication in ways that would have been impossible only a few years ago.
Matthews believes Americans are becoming desensitized to that.
That may be the most striking part of her warning.
The concern, in her view, is not just what Trump posts.
It is how quickly the country stops being surprised by it.
A president depicted commanding robot armies.
A fake map swallowing neighboring countries.
A muscular superhero version of himself.
A giant hammer smashing Iran.
Each new image attracts attention for a few hours before another arrives.
And Matthews’ argument is that the constant stream itself has become the story.
Whether it reflects calculation, obsession, trolling or something else cannot be determined from social-media posts alone.
But one thing is undeniable:
The online behavior of the President of the United States has become so extraordinary that even someone who once worked inside his White House is now publicly asking Americans to stop treating it as normal.
