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WASHINGTON — In the real world, President Trump is struggling to stop inflation, rout the Iranian government and restore American manufacturing with tariffs.

However, it’s a different story in the fantastical vision that he shares with supporters on social media. Over Labor Day weekend, Trump and the White House unleashed an extraordinarily heavy torrent of memes that portrayed the president as singularly powerful.

One video depicted Trump as a superhero wielding Green Lantern’s ring to effortlessly build a wall to keep out migrants and erect a slew of busy factories. Another post showed him in a U.S. hockey uniform looming over Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney as Carney cowered on the ice. And another had Trump on a military ship as it bombarded an enemy fleet.

Trump’s allure has always relied on a mythical version of himself, from “The Apprentice” to the White House, but the gap between meme and reality has become glaringly stark ahead of the midterm elections. Most U.S. adults are unhappy with Trump’s handling of the economy and say the Iran war hasn’t been worth it, but Trump has responded with outlandish images of himself as unstoppable and omnipotent.

Memes risk sidestepping reality

Some of the pictures are generated with artificial intelligence, and the administration has previously defended the memes as funny and their critics as humorless. Yet the stakes right now are serious for congressional Republicans who have tied their own fate to a president with low approval numbers. Trump’s party will put him center stage at an unusual midterm convention on Wednesday and Thursday in Dallas in hopes of stoking voters’ enthusiasm.

Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist, said that Trump’s social media posts can energize his base of “Make America Great Again” followers, although the tradeoff is that he’s not talking about how to fix inflation.

The voters who are likely to determine control of Congress in the midterms “are not going to be won over with memes,” Madden said. “The affordability voter is driving this election cycle and the issues they care about are anchored in the economy.”

The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment. Trump sometimes plucks memes from a sprawling ecosystem of online conservative supporters, and sometimes his government staff produces them as part of their official messaging. Recently they created a series of old-school video games, such as a “Tetris” knockoff called “Build the Wall.”

“The memes will continue,” Kaelan Dorr, a member of the White House communications team, recently posted on social media. “The winning will continue.”

Aging presidents promote vitality online

The problem for Trump is that voters have other images they’re using to define him. Drivers can spot through their windshields that gasoline is averaging $4.15 a gallon, up nearly 30% from a year ago because of the Iran war. And social media is inundated with questions about the 80-year-old president’s health and vitality, spurred by pictures of his bruised hands or video clips of him appearing to fall asleep in meetings.

White House officials have said the bruising is caused by “frequent handshaking” and Trump’s aspirin regimen, and they’ve denied that he’s dozed off.

Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, is three years older and faced relentless scrutiny about his age while in office. His White House came to embrace a meme version of Biden with lasers for eyes, suggesting that he was powerful and focused rather than infirm.

Andrew Bates, who was a deputy press secretary for Biden, said that Trump’s memes seem to be about avoiding the actual responsibilities of governing. He said they risk angering voters who see Trump as more focused on redecorating the White House than bringing the Iran war to a successful end.

“When a president who ran on bringing gas prices under $2 a gallon is now saying, ‘You’re at four dollars, it’s OK,’ it unfortunately makes sense that he’s also posting fever dreams,” Bates said.

Some memes have caused trouble

The memes have occasionally gotten Trump into trouble. He posted an image of himself as Jesus in April, which caused a degree of consternation among some supporters. The president later claimed he thought the image showed him as a medical doctor — albeit a doctor in Biblical robes with light emanating from his hands.

In February, his account posted a racist video of former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, as primates, which he deleted after a backlash.

Last October, Trump shared a video of him in a fighter jet dumping feces on Americans who were protesting his policies.

What the memes have not done so far is boost his wider approval ratings. Only 33% of U.S. adults approve of how he is handling the job of being president, according to a July AP-NORC poll.

But the polling also hits at a reason why he might be sending the memes to rally his core supporters. Just 15% of U.S. adults strongly approve of his presidency, the poll found, a slight decline from 22% shortly after he took office.

Boak writes for the Associated Press.

Sept. 2 (UPI) — Patagonia, an outdoor apparel company, announced Wednesday it sued the Trump administration for cuts dramatically shrinking the size of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.

This is the second time Patagonia has sued the administration, the company said. In 2017, during Trump’s first term, it became the first company to sue a sitting president over public land after the president issued orders shrinking Bears Ears by 85% and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, also in Utah, by nearly half.

The case was not decided by the time of the 2020 election, and President Joe Biden restored both monuments to their original size in 2021.

On July 13, Trump issued orders to shrink them again — Bears Ears by about 91% this time and Grand Staircase-Escalante by about 90%. This amounts to nearly 3 million acres of land that will lose monument-related protections, the company said in a press release.

“Slashing Bears Ears and dismantling the Bears Ears commission is a betrayal of Tribal sovereignty and needlessly throws away years of effort to create the first Tribal co-management structure of a national monument in U.S. history,” Ryan Gellert, Patagonia CEO, said in a statement. “Patagonia worked with the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, scientists, conservation groups, outdoor industry advocates and more to establish the monument in 2016, and we are committed to defending it today and into the future.”

President Barack Obama designated the Bears Ears monument in late 2016, following a proposal by five Tribal entities: the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation and the Pueblo of Zuni. A coalition of these groups co-manages the monument with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

Patagonia says the U.S. Antiquities Act gives presidents the power to designate national monuments but not to undo them. However, the Trump administration, as well as others including Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, say the monuments violate that act, which they say limits the designation to the smallest parcel of land necessary for the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.

The Trump administration argued that term “objects of historic or scientific interest” in the Antiquities Act has been stretched to include landscapes and biodiversity — and should not.

When signing the new orders in July, Trump criticized the size of the monuments, claiming that the public cannot hunt, fish or “virtually not even walk” on the land. However, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management explicitly say people can hike, hunt and fish in both monuments, as well as take part in other forms of outdoor recreation.

The Center for Western Priorities said in July that Trump’s orders could open the land for sale or lease oil, gas, mining or logging companies within 60 days.