DAVID MARCUS: Trump's McDonald’s visit served up four brilliant political moments

It may have looked like the Jets were not trying hard enough at times in Sunday night’s loss to the Steelers. It is the contrary, according to interim coach Jeff Ulbrich.

The mother of three's death in July has been ruled as "accidental" by the Virginia Department of Health after she was found unresponsive at home.

A Southern California duo face federal sentencing for selling tens of thousands of fentanyl-laced pills and cocaine on the dark web.

"She started wearing hats to work so that I wouldn't be the only person in a work meeting wearing a hat," the actress said about her co-star.

Police later found human skeletal remains among the ash of the incinerator plant and are working to determine if they belong to Agostina Rubini Medina.

Liam Payne's sister Nicola learned of his death through an alert on her phone: 'I went cold.' Meanwhile, toxicology identifies some of the drugs in his system.

A Dallas-based biotech company has nearly completed its reconstruction of the Tasmanian tiger just two years into its de-extinction project. The last known thylacine, commonly referred to as the Tasmanian tiger, died in captivity on Sept. 7, 1936. None have been spotted across Tasmania since, despite countless expeditions attempting to rediscover the tiger. Without the...

The Venezuelan migrants were caught trying to pay for Amtrak tickets, along with their children, ages 1 and 3.

Chappelle sang and and told jokes while Mary J. Blige rapped at the bash that brought out guests including Common and Jennifer Hudson.

Elon Musk can land a rocket booster back at the launch tower seven minutes after it takes off, but swing states can’t count votes in a timely manner. 

Terrorist killer Yahya Sinwar did not want peace. Not once, not ever. 

South Korea issued a demand to Russia to condemn the cooperation between Russia and North Korea, calling for the withdrawal of North Korean troops from Russia's war with Ukraine.

The singer says when you love yourself, 'you're gonna find someone that really, really gives a f--k about you."

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre pushed back on the idea that Vice President Kamala Harris has struggled to distinguish herself from President Biden.

One fishy foul in Game 5 helped end a 28-year wait.

In a letter obtained by Fox News Digital, an attorney for former President Trump is demanding CBS News to release the full transcript of its interview of Vice President Kamala Harris.

A conversation with Elaine Godfrey about what makes this moment so ripe for conspiracy theories

Shirel Golan, 22, ended her life after surviving the Oct. 7 massacre at the Nova Music Festival, suffering with acute symptoms of PTSD-related stress — and until we address the issue of toxic online rhetoric, survivors will continue to suffer.

A fan told OutKick that Air Force Academy security didn't allow him to wear a shirt saying "Keep Women's Sports Female" at a match against the controversial San Jose State squad.

“I don’t want to see anyone lose, right? But the harsh reality is that we can do what we can afford," the mayor said. "We’ve been stretched to the limits."

Lasry -- the 65-year-old former owner of the Milwaukee Bucks and a major Democratic fund-raiser for Vice President Kamala Harris -- accused Gina Strum of threatening to make it “really, really, ugly” for him and his company, according to the complaint.

"Although she has help, it's still a lot of work for her to balance and coordinate everything," a source close to the "Kardashians" star said Monday.

Talk about a Halloween treat.

The difference between a "team" and a "roster" was at the center of "Get Up's" discussion Monday when rehashing the Jets' latest loss.

Sean "Diddy" Combs revealed the three words he would say before he dies in a game with Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg in a video circulating on social media.

Alcon said it had refused a request from Warner Bros. to use images from the firm for Tesla’s Oct. 10 live-streamed cybercab unveiling. Tesla then used images created with AI, the lawsuit said.

The Van Halen drummer writes an elegy to modern guitar god Eddie about a brotherhood tested by drug abuse, power trips and all the other common traps that befall megastars who once shared the same bedroom.

The 25-year-old has expanded his game through his first three seasons in Washington and could remain with the team for several more.

Lakers coach JJ Redick says there is no decision yet on whether Bronny James will the court with father LeBron during the season opener against Minnesota.

The Defense Department and the FBI are investigating what could be a significant intelligence breach about Israel's plans to strike Iran.

The best way to not be stepbrothers to the Yankees would have been to beat them in the World Series and then take Soto away. Half of that is still possible. And Steve Cohen should try.

Las Vegas Raiders quarterback Aidan O'Connell fractured his thumb during the Raiders' 20-15 loss to the L.A. Rams on Sunday and will reportedly be out for four to six weeks.

SAN ANDRÉS LARRÁINZAR, México. — Cientos de personas rindieron homenaje el lunes en su pueblo natal al padre Marcelo Pérez, el sacerdote católico, defensor de los indígenas y campesinos asesinado la víspera al término de una misa en el sureño estado de Chiapas.

El papa Francisco anunció el lunes la expulsión de dos altos miembros del Sodalicio de Vida Cristiana en Perú, elevando a 13 el número total de separados, que incluyen a diez personas el mes pasado y al fundador laico del grupo en agosto.

A San Diego County official criticized the flying of illegal immigrants out of California to other states so close to the presidential election.

One of Trump's surprised drive-thru customers was a woman originally from Brazil who pleaded with him to fix the United States and not let it become like her native country.

Former President Donald Trump says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should “do what he wants to do" with regards to a potential retaliatory strike against Iran. 

Nearly 10 years after it was announced. Harriet Tubman is yet to be on the $20 bill. The U.S. Mint - now run by a Black woman - just issued Tubman coins.

Also, the first sickle cell gene therapy patient left the hospital. Here’s the latest at the end of Monday.

Elon Musk has donated more than $70 million to the pro-Trump political action committee he created in order to help reelect Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

Strokes are the fifth-leading cause of death in the United States, and the leading cause of disability. On Monday, the American Stroke Association published its updated guidelines for stroke prevention.

He is facing charges of first-degree aggravated assault and three counts of second-degree assault after authorities issued a warrant for his arrest last week. 

Molinaro says his current opponent for congress, Josh Riley, is running an even more dishonest and deceitful campaign than his 2018 matchup against Cuomo.

In the continental U.S., some of the best places to see the northern lights are Michigan's Upper Peninsula and North Dakota.

Stargazers should prepare themselves for an uptick in aurora borealis -- or northern lights -- activity as the current solar cycle nears its peak.

For me, it’s the amber glow of the fry machine gently illuminating the exhausted 45th president of the United States of America. The glare of the potato-warming apparatus casts a shadow on the left side of Donald Trump’s face as he works at a McDonald’s in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. This man, who held the nuclear codes just 1,369 days ago, is now wearing an apron and doling out fast food.The images of Trump’s McDonald’s stunt—in which he jiggled the fryer and handed burgers out of a window yesterday—are uncanny. There’s Trump, face contorted in the appearance of deep concentration, tilting a fry basket to the heavens; Trump hanging two-thirds of the way out a drive-through window, waving like a beleaguered Norman Rockwell character; Trump, mouth agape, appearing to yell into the middle distance of a fast-food parking lot. The shadows of the McDonald’s kitchen, the interplay between the sheen of the stainless steel and the cast of the nugget-warming lights, give the very real photos a distinct Midjourney aesthetic. These pictures immediately reminded me of the viral, glossy AI-generated images of Trump being arrested and thrown in jail that started circulating in the spring of 2023.Perhaps it’s because my feeds have been simultaneously clogged with election-season garbage and AI-generated slop, but the McDonald’s photoshoot struck me as a moment of strange synthesis, where reality and tech-enabled fiction felt somehow mashed together by the internet’s cultural particle accelerator. Trump proffering Dollar Menu items isn’t AI, but it is still slop in all the ways that matter: a hastily staged depiction of a fairly stupid, though entertaining fantasy, meant to delight, troll, and, most important, emphasize a false impression of the candidate.[Read: The most revealing moment of a Trump rally]This is clarifying, insofar that it demonstrates that Trump’s primary output is always a kind of slop. Slop, as it relates to AI, is loosely defined as spammy, cheap blocks of text, video, or images, quickly generated by computer programs for mass distribution. But nonsynthetic slop is everywhere too. What is a Trump rally but a teleprompter reading of stump-speech slop, interspersed with inexplicable lorem ipsum about Hannibal Lecter and wind turbines spun up by the unknowable language model in Trump’s own head? What are Trump’s tweets and Truth Social shitposts if not slop morsels, hurled into the internet’s ether for the rest of us to react to? And what is the Trump campaign producing if not fantastical propaganda intended to conjure a false image of Joe Biden’s America as a dark, dangerous place on the verge of destruction, besieged by immigrants, and savable only by one heroic man? (For instance, earlier today, Trump posted an AI-generated picture of himself as a buff Pittsburgh Steelers lineman.) The McDonald’s photo op was barely real: The restaurant was closed to the public during Trump’s visit. He ignored a question about the minimum wage. Only prescreened customers were allowed in the drive-through, and those customers were not able to place orders—they just took whatever Trump handed to them. Like any good AI slop, the op illustrated a fantasy—in this case, that Trump, a man who has long lived in a gilded penthouse, is a working-class man.In August, I wrote that AI slop is now the aesthetic of the far-right and MAGA coalition, in part because it allows hyper-partisans to illustrate the fictional universe they’ve been peddling and living in for the past decade-plus. But MAGA world has always trafficked in slop. Old memes depicted “God Emperor” Trump. Right-wing artists including Ben Garrison and Jon McNaughton have long illustrated Trump in an absurd light—hulking and hypermasculine or holding a lantern on a boat, like George Washington crossing the Delaware. This was proto-slop, for a simpler, more analog time.Slop isn’t necessarily a commentary on quality so much as on how it is meant to be consumed: fleetingly, and with little or no thought beyond the initial limbic-system response. The main characteristic of slop is that there is an endless supply of it. And so it makes sense that campaigns—not just Trump’s—tend to traffic in it. Campaigns are nothing if not aggressive, often-desperate content farms hoping to get attention. In service of that mission, they meme, pander, email, and text, frequently in cringeworthy fashion. Not unlike the fast food that Trump was hawking, slop is sometimes delicious, but it is never nutrient dense.[Read: The MAGA aesthetic is AI slop]AI slop has clogged the internet with synthetic ephemera, but it has also given a name to the human-made attentional grist that’s all around us—the slop that exists in real life, in meatspace. Trump was really at that Buck’s County McDonald’s, debasing himself for swing-state votes in the same way that candidates have for generations (see: Rick Perry eating a corn dog in 2011). Presidential campaigning has long offered an unreal portrait of American life—it’s just been made more peculiar by the presence of Trump.If AI slop can teach us something about a man like Trump, it seems that the opposite is also true. In the lead-up to the candidate’s fast-food stop, various news outlets, fans, and even T-shirt sellers used generative-AI tools to mock up what the visit might look like. The photos aren’t terribly far off (a few of them accurately placed Trump in an apron), but all of them seem to be trying too hard. In some, Trump’s clothing is too garish; in others, he’s toting a comically large amount of food. None capture the awkward banality of the candidate’s actual campaign stop. In his own way, Trump has shown us all the limits of artificial intelligence. Computers, at least for now, cannot quite capture the crushing surreality and maddening absurdity of modern electoral politics.

Israel accused Hezbollah of allegedly hiding more than $500 million in gold and cash in a secret bunker beneath a Beirut hospital -- tipping off Lebanese officials to the stash while saying there were no plans to attack the building.

A Prince William County rescue crew removed a family dog from the debris of a house that exploded six days ago.