Daniel Dale: The fake "medbeds" announcement video has been deleted from Trump's Truth Social acco

[riversedge]

In the meantime--the #MAGA fans sucked it up.

Daniel Dale @ddale8
2h
The fake “medbeds” announcement video has been deleted from President Trump’s Truth Social account.


Last night, the president posted a fictional Fox News report in which an AI version of himself announced a new (nonexistent) policy of giving every American “a free medbed card” to give them “guaranteed access” to (imaginary) hospitals in which they can be returned “to full health” by (imaginary) magical “medbeds,” a conspiracy theory that circulates in an an obscure fraction of the online far right.

Link to tweet

Alex Kaplan
@AlKapDC
·
15h
Trump tonight appears to have pushed the false "medbed" conspiracy theory, which has spread in the far-right internet over the years. https://yahoo.com/news/qanon-con

Link to tweet

[Ocelot II]

1. It seems like Trump will like or forward any social media post that mentions his name

or features him in a positive light, no matter how ridiculous or fake it might be.

[newdeal2]

3. Or he is not running the account.

Just like he’s not really running the White House.

[riversedge]

4. If he had a good staff, it would one minute to see how stupid these med beds are!! But of

course, I doubt he listens much to his staff.

[GoCubsGo]

5. This has his idiot first-born son written all over it.

Probably posted while on one of his cocaine benders.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. You can fool some of the people all of the time, and that sadly is a large proportion of Republican voters

There's pretty much no down-side to Trump making any kind of claim, no matter how lunatic. This episode will disappear within 24 hours, and no one will use it as an example of Trump either being insane, or of him lying shamelessly.

[0rganism]

6. Medbed? Like the extra-terrestrial sarcophagus in "Stargate"?

In the absence of quality secondary-school education, looks like people fall back to the Hollywood fictions and mythology of a simpler time. This is the great failure of my generation, we got too good at weaving fantasy into reality and forgot the importance of a rational examined approach to... well, everything. Of course there were (and always will be) other forces at work, but this proficiency in making dreamworlds tangible while devaluing the existing society's institutions has borne strange fruit.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

7. MaddowBlog-Why it was so deeply weird to see Trump amplify 'medbed' pseudoscience

Last edited Fri Oct 3, 2025, 07:43 PM - Edit history (1)

Someone used AI to create a fake Fox News segment that showed the president touting magical beds to the public. So why did he promote it?

Someone used AI to create a fake Fox News segment featuring Trump touting magical “MedBed” technology. He then used to his platform to amplify the nonsensical pseudoscience.

Maybe now’s a good time to renew the whole “cognitive decline” conversation? www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo...

— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2025-09-29T18:39:10.323Z

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-medbed-pseudoscience-rcna234487

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.......

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.”.....

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.”

[LetMyPeopleVote]

8. MaddowBlog-White House tries to defend Trump amplifying bizarre 'medbed' pseudoscience

Karoline Leavitt had several days to come up with a reason why the president promoted a video about magic beds. She apparently couldn’t think of much.

White House officials had several days to come up with a reason why Trump promoted a bonkers "medbed" video.

Evidently, they couldn't think of much. www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo...

— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2025-10-02T21:29:24.933Z

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/white-house-tries-defend-trump-amplifying-bizarre-medbed-pseudoscience-rcna235212

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.

Reporter: The president posted an AI deepfake of himself talking about medbeds. What was he trying to communicate?

Leavitt: He is transparent. He likes to share memes and videos. I think it is refreshing to have a president who is so open and honest.

— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) 2025-10-01T19:17:41.725Z

.....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.....

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.