It’s not exactly a secret that Donald Trump uses his social media platform to promote some deeply strange ideas, but the president broke new and unsettling ground this past weekend.
On Saturday, for reasons unknown, Trump amplified a video of a fake, AI-generated Fox News segment in which a computer-generated version of himself declared that “every American will soon receive their own MedBed card” that will grant them access to new “MedBed hospitals.”
I’d never heard anything about this, but there are fringe conspiracy theorists who apparently believe there are magical, futuristic beds that can cure every disease, regrow missing limbs and even reverse the human aging process. (A Politico report noted, “An offshoot of MedBed believers are QAnon devotees who insist the non-existent technology is being used to secretly keep John F. Kennedy Jr. alive.”)
To be sure, Trump has a habit of pushing weird stuff, but even by contemporary Republican standards, this was one of those moments when it seemed sensible to wonder if the sitting American president was OK. Indeed, if Joe Biden had done the same thing during his term, the political world’s conversation about the 25th Amendment would likely have been quite robust.
With this in mind, at a briefing on Wednesday, a reporter asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt what, exactly, Trump was trying to communicate to the public.
“I think the president saw the video and posted it, and then took it down,” she replied. “And he has the right to do that. It’s his social media. He’s incredibly transparent, as you all know. … He likes to share memes, he likes to share videos. … I think it’s quite refreshing that we have a president who is so open and honest.”
So, a few things.
First, no one has said Trump lacked the “right” to promote preposterous pseudoscience via social media. Rather, the question was why he did it and what his decision tells us about his state of mind.
Second, pushing bonkers videos via social media does not make an official “incredibly transparent.” If the White House wants to talk about Trump’s affinity for transparency, it can get back to us after the public gets access to his tax returns, the Epstein files and the video of border czar Tom Homan allegedly accepting a bag full of cash from undercover FBI agents.
Third, Leavitt’s suggestion that Trump promoting a “medbed” video is a reflection of his honesty is almost as weird as the fake Fox News segment itself.
I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic. If I worked for someone who pushed a video about magical beds and someone asked me to explain how and why this happened, I’d probably struggle to come up with a coherent defense, too.
But Leavitt had several days to come up with something to say about this, and the fact that this was the line she settled on speaks volumes about just how bananas Trump’s move was.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
