When it comes to science and medicine, Donald Trump’s track record is an embarrassment. We are, after all, talking about a president who endorsed injections of disinfectant as a possible Covid treatment five years ago.
But the Republican made matters quite a bit worse last week, holding a radical White House event in which Trump railed against Tylenol for the better part of an hour. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia vaccine researcher, told The Washington Post, “That was the most dangerously irresponsible press conference in the realm of public health in American history.”
After some administration officials tried to walk back his comments a bit, the president doubled down Friday with an all-caps screed in which he pushed bizarre medical advice about vaccines and pain treatments.
One day later, he helped introduce the public to the “MedBed” idea. Politico reported:
Yesterday on Truth Social, the president of the United States shared a video purporting to be a segment on Fox News (it wasn’t) in which an A.I.-generated, deep-faked version of himself sat in the White House and promised that ‘every American will soon receive their own MedBed card’ that will grant them access to new ‘MedBed hospitals.’
In all candor, I’ll confess that I’d never heard anything about this before the weekend, but evidently, there are fringe conspiracy theorists who believe there are magical, futuristic beds that can cure every disease, regrow missing limbs and even reverse the human aging process.
This is, of course, quite bonkers, though as the Politico report went on to note, “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.”
So to recap, someone used AI to create a fake Fox News segment that purported to show Trump vowing to make medbed technology available to the public (at medbed hospitals, of course) despite the inconvenient fact that medbed technology does not exist. The sitting American president then used his social media platform to amplify this fake Fox News segment, though he (or someone on his team) eventually took down his post on the subject.
I’m well aware of how trite this is, but take a moment to consider what would happen if Joe Biden had done this. Then imagine how loud the political world’s conversation about the 25th Amendment would be soon after.
Complicating matters is the familiarity of these awkward circumstances. Trump recently boasted about people in Memphis praising him after National Guard troops arrived in the city, despite the fact that troops hadn’t yet arrived in the city. A month earlier, the president shared the details of a conversation with Maryland Gov. Wes Moore that did not occur in reality, extending a pattern in which the Republican has repeatedly shared the details of conversations that have only occurred in his overactive imagination.
A month before that, Trump expressed surprise that Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was appointed, despite the fact that he was the one who appointed Powell in the first place.
Two weeks earlier, Trump participated in a press conference at a detention facility in the Florida Everglades, known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” and a reporter asked the president whether there was an “expected time frame” that detainees would be kept at the controversial camp. “I’m gonna spend a lot of — this is my home state,” the Republican replied. “I love it. … I feel very comfortable in the state — I’ll spend a lot of time here.” He appeared unfazed by the disconnect between the question and the answer. Incidents like these are not uncommon. Indeed, Democrats tried to make them a campaign issue ahead of Election Day 2024. In the race’s closing weeks, for example, Trump told a 12-minute story about Arnold Palmer’s genitalia, which came just days after the Republican decided to stop taking questions at a town hall event and instead swayed to music for 39 minutes. A year later, Trump has promoted a “medbed” video for reasons that have not yet been explained. As USA Today’s Rex Huppke summarized, after Trump twice suggested he was headed to Russia when he was actually going to Alaska, “That’s the sort of thing you hear before having to make a difficult decision about grandpa’s future.” Huppke similarly recently described the president as being “in obvious mental decline.” This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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