Republicans' Revealing Fetish for A.I.-Enhanced Trump and Vance Pics

A celebratory postdebate picture, heavily edited to masculinize Vance’s features, shows how close Republicans come to gender dysphoria and trans gender theory—without realizing it.

Bright and early the morning after the vice presidential debate, Republican Congressman Mike Collins of Georgia shared a puzzling picture from his X account of GOP vice presidential candidate Senator JD Vance. At first glance, the image masquerades as a conventional political headshot. It features Vance delivering a steely gaze, sitting before a soft blue backdrop framed by an American flag and the state flag of Ohio. Vance is wearing the Trumpkin uniform of a blue suit, crisp white dress shirt, and shiny red tie, the conservative political drag that links the wearer to the MAGA political project by imitating the boss’s sartorial style. The only text Mike Collins’s account included with the image was “gm.”—a very-online way of saying, “Good morning.”

Except what Collins posted was in fact a substantial digital modification of one of Vance’s real headshots. A.I.-powered software had made Vance appear more masculine than his flesh and blood self. It subtracted a few dozen pounds from the real Vance’s mug, making him look more muscular and toned. (The real Vance has also lost weight recently, which he attributes to diet and exercise, but the algorithm went still further.) It made his forehead larger, and it lengthened his face. His hair appears to have been volumized, its strands thickened and glossed as if they were slathered with bear grease. With A.I. assistance, Vance’s fuller lips now sat above a jaw so sharp you could slice ham off it and a chin just a notch below Habsburg. Gone were Vance’s boyish cheeks, which his recently adopted beard inconstantly shrouds. The A.I. software instead inserted the high and defined cheekbones of a male model. Vance’s eyes were wider, clearer, and more deeply set, his brows sharpened.

Internet denizens let out a collective chortle, many people claiming that the app had “yassified” Vance’s mug—i.e., glammed it up. But it’s probably more accurate to say that Vance was “Chadified”: Vance’s digitally recontoured facial features now aligned with a fantastical idealization of masculinity that the very online know as “the Chad.” The Chad first entered public consciousness via incel culture, which furnished a baroque taxonomy of psychosexual types for both men and women. In that taxonomy, the Chad is a muscular alpha male so confident in his masculinity that he embodies it without pretense or premeditation, unlike his neurotic, feckless counterpart, “the Virgin.” The Chad is powerful, instinctual, authentic, natural, unbothered, and a happy warrior.

The alterations Collins’s image made to Vance’s face match the quintessential Chad’s facial features—heavy brow, impossibly chiseled jaw and chin, cartoonishly thick hair—closely enough that Collins was, intentionally or otherwise, visually quoting the meme. (I suspect intentionally; Collins’s official X bio includes the line “Come for the memes, stay for the policy.”)

https://newrepublic.com/article/186752/yassified-jd-vance-ai-trump-mike-collins