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Donald Trump Looks Like 'They Live!' Aliens, Thanks to DeepDream

This explains everything.
Screencap via

Without giving too much away, the denouement in John Carpenter 80's sci-fi cult classic They Live! is electric. It makes sense why the world is terrible: the world's elite, controlling the population through advertising, just might have ulterior motives. The film's influence permeates pop culture, from Shepard Fairey's apparrel to Duke Nukem video games, and it's the first thing that comes to mind when watching this terrifying video of a Donald Trump speech run through Google's DeepDream artificial neural network, Trump Deep Nightmare, by artist and technologist Eric Cheng.

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We've seen the effect DeepDream has on famous artworksCronenberg films, and the world's most disturbing images, but it takes on new meaning when fused with the unsettling narrative of Trump's rise to prominence. Seeing Trump turn into a psychedelic Chewbacca (with worse hair) and covered in puppyslugs gives the mind a half second of release. Surreal Trump makes it seem possible that this whole uncomfortable situation proving our system is a sham could be a dream—or nightmare—that's possible to wake up from. It makes the Donald seem silly, separate, irrelevant to reality, and it's less agressive than the other anti-Trump art making headlines today: a tombstone with Trump's name and the epitaph, "Make America Hate Again," anonymously embedded in Central Park.

Someone placed an actual Trump tombstone in Central Park

A photo posted by Sachin RB (@sachinrb) on Mar 27, 2016 at 5:03am PDT

The alien-ness of Trump Deep Nightmare makes even more sense when Cheng reveals the source image he used to create the video: the iconic, tentacled face of Cthulu.

Watch Trump Deep Nightmare in full below.

See more of Eric Cheng's work on his website.

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