President Donald Trump shared a bizarre and clearly AI-generated video in a late Saturday evening Truth Social post.
The post, which was mysteriously deleted hours later, but can be accessed via an archived version, shows a fake Fox News clip featuring Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.
In the clip, an AI-generated version of Lara Trump alleges that the president had “launched a historic new healthcare system,” featuring “medbeds,” an unhinged conspiracy theory about secret “beds” that can supposedly cure practically any ailment.
Perhaps even more bafflingly, a phony version of Trump proudly announces the venture from behind his desk in the Oval Office in the video, meaning the president is now sharing deepfakes of himself with no disclaimer that they’re not real.
“Every American will soon receive their own medbed card,” the fake Trump says in the clip. “With it, you’ll have guaranteed access to our new hospitals led by the top doctors in the nation, equipped with the most advanced technology in the world.”
The actual Fox News, usually a die-hard ally of the president, quickly acknowledged that the segment “never aired on Fox News Channel or any other Fox News Media platforms.”
It’s a new low for the president, in other words, who has already garnered a reputation for posting all kinds of AI slop on social media, from pictures of fake sports cars and a litany of AI self-portraits to videos of bearded belly dancers in Gaza.
There are a finite number of possibilities for his latest video, none of them good. Did he somehow think the video was real? Did he know it was fake, but shared it anyway? Was he trying to fool his followers — or is he himself not clear on what’s real and what’s an AI-generated fake?
“If ‘medbed’ technology were real, it would be the greatest medical advance in generations,” tweeted Media Matters senior fellow Matthew Gertz. “Trump should have to explain why he suggested it was using the channel he makes major policy announcements, and why he deleted it after the fact.”
“How do you bring people back to a shared reality when those in power keep stringing them along?” asked ethnographer and conspiracy theories researcher Noelle Cook.
“Trump deleted his bizarre post featuring an AI video of him endorsing ‘medbeds,’ which raises the question of whether he’s so confused that he thought it was a real video of him talking,” journalist Aaron Rupar offered.
The “medbed” conspiracy theory has direct ties to QAnon, as CNN reports, purporting that a shadowy UFO program inside the government has successfully reverse-engineered alien healing technologies, which it’s for some reason keeping from the public. (It’s worth pointing out here that the person currently running the government is Trump, meaning that in the anti-logic of QAnon, he would be the one keeping the nonexistent medbeds out of the hands of patients who would benefit from them.)
Some QAnon adherents even believed that a “medbed” was used to keep John F. Kennedy alive over half a century after his assassination.
Trump has amplified unhinged QAnon conspiracy theories for years now, sharing hundreds of posts promoting the fringe group’s ideas.
The “medbed” conspiracy theory is particularly unfortunate, considering the sorry state of the US healthcare system, which has historically excluded those who cannot afford insurance, largely leaving them to their own fate.
Worse yet, the Trump administration has taken direct aim at federal government initiatives in real life, slashing over half a trillion dollars from Medicare, a health insurance program for people over the age of 65 and younger people with disabilities.
Without any form of social or medical safety net, Americans could certainly benefit from an entirely fictional and worse-than-snake-oil healing mat.
“Trump was accidentally promoting Universal Healthcare for all Americans, but then deleted it once he was told what he did,” one X user joked.
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