New research from Cybernews has catalogued 156 deepfake incidents targeting currently serving US government officials over a two-year period. Only 23 of the 602 officials studied were targeted at least once, but distribution is heavily skewed: Donald Trump alone accounts for 90 of the 156 instances, or 58% of the total.
The next most targeted figures are Secretary of State Marco Rubio with 13 instances and Vice President JD Vance with 12. Together the three account for 115 of the 156 recorded cases — 73.7% of the dataset.
The 76% Republican skew partly reflects Trump's outsized share. Remove him from the dataset and the political distribution becomes more balanced. The most-deepfaked Democrat in the analysis is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with nine recorded instances.
The research analysed deepfakes of the President, Vice President, Cabinet members, governors, and members of Congress. The likelihood of being deepfaked drops significantly in larger groups like the House and Senate, where individual members carry lower public recognition and media visibility.
The findings land in the same week that Taylor Swift filed trademark applications covering her voice and likeness in an effort to create an enforcement mechanism against AI impersonation — a separate data point on the same problem. Whether legal instruments or detection systems will prove the more durable defence against synthetic media targeting public figures remains unresolved at the regulatory level in both the US and UK.
