What did Donald Trump do today?

He took down an obvious scam AI post he'd made to his social media account—or, at least, someone did.

Last night, Trump posted this video, in which an obviously AI-manipulated image of him promises to bring "medbed" technology to all American citizens.

Deep in the weirdest parts of online right-wing culture, "medbed" is the term for a science-fiction device that will supposedly cure diseases, leach "toxins" out of the body, and otherwise restore a patient to perfect health better than any human doctor. Sadly, they don't exist—but even more sadly, the belief that they do is very real. The mythology generally involves Trump's fight against a grand, shadowy conspiracy to keep these miracle devices out of reach for everyday Americans. Scammers have capitalized on this, selling desperate patients useless "treatments" in mockups of the beds for tens of thousands of dollars. 

It's not clear where Trump found the video, or whether someone in particular convinced him it was real or a good idea to post it, but it appears to have originated last week on an Instagram account connected to crypto scams. It's not impossible that Trump would have understood that it was fake but decided it was worth throwing some red meat to the cult-like conspiracy theorists who are an important part of his political base of support. 

But within hours, the general consensus was that Trump had just completely and uncritically accepted the video as real, and—as he had already done once that day—"announced" his new "policy" without checking with anybody actually running his government. 

Other scammers were quick to seize on the opportunity Trump created for them. Almost immediately, a website appeared at "medbedcard.com" selling early access to the "terahertz technology" of the fictional medbed for $447.

 

This morning, before Trump began his usual morning posting binge, the video was quietly deleted. The White House has not offered any explanation, but a number of Trump staffers (and the occasional hacker who guesses his passwords) have access to his social media accounts.

In short: the 79-year-old Trump appears to have fallen for an obvious AI scam, based on a QAnon conspiracy theory, featuring fake video that he believed were things he'd actually said. He then posted it to social media as though it were true, and created an opportunity for other scammers to fleece his supporters for hundreds of dollars before someone in his administration was finally able to take it down.

The web address where Trump's original post sat now returns the Orwellian error message "This Truth no longer exists."

 

 

Why does this matter?

• Usually, when someone's 79-year-old grandpa falls for a scam like this, the family takes away his credit cards and starts looking for a memory care unit to place him in.