How did Donald Trump end up posting Taylor Swift deepfakes?
When Donald Trump shared a slew of AI-generated images this week that falsely depicted Taylor Swift and her fans endorsing his campaign for president, the former US president was amplifying the work of a murky non-profit with aspirations to bankroll rightwing media influencers and a history of spreading misinformation.
Several of the images Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, which showed digitally rendered young women in “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts, were the products of the John Milton Freedom Foundation. Launched last year, the Texas-based non-profit organization frames itself as a press freedom group with the goal of “empowering independent journalists” and “fortifying the bedrock of democracy”.
The group’s day-to-day operations appear to revolve around sharing engagement bait on X and seeking millions from donors for a “fellowship program” chaired by a high school sophomore that would award $100,000 to Twitter personalities such as Glenn Greenwald, Andy Ngo and Lara Logan, according to a review of the group’s tax records, investor documents and social media output. The John Milton Freedom Foundation did not respond to a request for comment to a set of questions about its operations and fellowship program.
After months of retweeting conservative media influencers and echoing Elon Musk’s claims that freedom of speech is under attack from leftwing forces, one of the organization’s messages found its way to Trump and then his millions of supporters.
Trump distanced himself from the images in an interview with Fox Business on Wednesday, saying: “I don’t know anything about them other than someone else generated them. I didn’t generate them.”
Disinformation researchers have long warned that generative AI has the ability to lower the bar for creating misleading content and threaten information around elections. After Musk’s xAI company released its largely unregulated Grok image generator last week, there has been a surge of AI content that has included depictions of Trump, Kamala Harris and other political figures. The Milton Freedom Foundation is one of many small groups flooding social media with so-called AI slop.
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A niche non-profit’s AI slop makes its way to Trump
During the spike in AI images on X, the conservative @amuse account posted the images of AI-generated Swift fans to more than 300,000 followers. On the text of the post, which was labeled “satire”, was a watermark that stated it was “sponsored by the John Milton Freedom Foundation”. Trump posted a screenshot of @amuse’s tweet on Truth Social.
The @amuse account has considerable reach itself, with about 390,000 followers on X and dozens of daily posts. Running @amuse appears to be Alexander Muse, listed as a consultant in the investor prospectus of the Milton Foundation, who also writes a rightwing commentary Substack that includes posts exploring election conspiracy theories. The @amuse account has numerous connections with Muse. The X account is connected to a Substack posting the same articles that Muse publishes on his LinkedIn page, which also has the username “amuse”, reflecting his first initial and last name. Muse’s book on how to secure startup funding, which includes examples of him asking ChatGPT to pretend it’s Musk and offer business advice, lists that same Substack account as its publisher.
Prominent accounts including Musk have shared and replied to @amuse’s posts, which recently have included AI depictions of Trump fighting Darth Vader and sexualized imagery of Harris. Its banner picture is currently an AI-generated photo of Trump surrounded by women in “Swifties” shirts. The account posts misleading, pro-Trump headlines such as claiming Harris turned hundreds of thousands of children over to human traffickers as “border czar”. The headlines, like the AI-generated Swifties for Trump images, come with the watermark “sponsored by the John Milton Freedom Foundation”.
The John Milton Freedom Foundation, named after the 17th-century British poet and essayist, has a small online footprint: a website, an investor prospectus and an X account with fewer than 500 followers. The team behind it, according to its own documents, consists of five people based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area with varying degrees of experience in Republican politics. Muse’s daughter, described as a 10th grade honor student on the non-profit’s site, serves as the Milton Foundation’s “fellowship chair”.
The foundation’s stated goal is to raise $2m from major donors to award $100,000 grants to a list of “fellows” made up of rightwing media influencers. These include people like the former CBS journalist turned far-right star Lara Logan, who was cut from Newsmax in recent years for going on a QAnon-inspired rant that claimed world leaders drink children’s blood, as well as the author of an anti-trans children’s book. The organization believes that this money would allow these already established influencers to “increase their reach by more than 10x in less than a year”, according to its investor prospectus.
While only one of the fellows listed on the foundation’s site mentions the organization on their X profiles and none follow its account, the @amuse account has a prominent link to the group’s community page and the foundation often engages with its posts.
It is not clear that the foundation has any money to give and if all the media influencers listed as its 2024 fellowship class know about the organization. One Texas-based account that posts anti-vaccine content lists itself as a “JMFF” fellow in their bio, but none of the others advertise any connection. The most recent tax records for the Freedom Foundation place it in the category of non-profits whose gross receipts, or total funds received from all sources, range from $0 to $50,000 – far below the millions it is seeking.
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The organization’s board includes its chair, Brad Merritt, who is touted as an experienced Republican organizer with claims to have raised $300m for various non-profits; its director, Shiree Sanchez, who served as assistant director of the Republican party of Texas between 1985 and 1986; and Mark Karaffa, a retired healthcare industry executive.
Muse’s experience in digital media appears to be far more extensive than the non-profit’s other members. In addition to his blog, he claims to have worked with James O’Keefe, the former CEO of the rightwing organization Project Veritas, who was known for hidden camera stings until he was ousted last year over allegations of misplaced funds. Muse, who is described in the prospectus as a “serial entrepreneur”, also blogs about how to make money from generative AI.
