President Donald Trump marveled at an AI video of himself aging over the years as part of his increasingly frequent posting schedule, which begins by showing him as a four-year-old and ends in the present day.
“Wow!!!” Trump, now 79, wrote in response to the video he posted on Truth Social, which appeared to be compiled from photographs and interview footage from his long career in the public eye.
Oddly, only one other person is featured in the trip down memory lane: Trump’s second wife, Marla Maples, to whom he was married from 1993 to 1999 and with whom he had a daughter, Tiffany Trump.
Perhaps awkwardly for the president, no mention is made of his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, to whom he was married from 1977 to 1990, the mother of Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump, and Ivanka Trump, or to his present wife, First Lady Melania Trump, mother of Barron Trump.
Forty years before he entered politics, the president rose to prominence in the mid-1970s as a New York City real estate scion, primed to succeed his father, Fred Trump, who had built an empire by acquiring residential tenement blocks in Brooklyn.
The video begins even before that, with the young Donald appearing as a smiling child.
It then accelerates to a yearbook photo of him in uniform, aged 18, while he was enrolled at New York Military Academy in 1964, before leaping forward to him as an emerging businessman in 1976, aged 30.
From there, the montage takes us through his heyday as a Manhattan luxury property developer, picking out key years such as 1985 – when he acquired Mar-a-Lago and the Atlantic City Hilton and owned the New Jersey Generals of the USFL – and 1996, when he took ownership of the Miss Universe Pageant.
We then see Trump in 2005 when he achieved a new level of national fame by hosting the NBC reality show The Apprentice, and in 2012 when he re-registered as a Republican prior to announcing his run for the presidency in 2015, a historic moment that began with his descent from the golden escalators at Trump Tower.
The video concludes in 2025, with Trump cut as an older, much sterner figure than the grinning corporate golden boy of his earlier career.
The whole show is soundtracked by the song “Forever Young” by 80s synthpop also-rans Alphaville, whose lyrics pointedly ask: “Do you really want to live forever?”
