Donald Trump may have just been fooled by an AI deepfake of himself. Over the weekend, the president uploaded a video to his Truth Social account that appeared to show him delivering an Oval Office address, touting a “historic new health care system.” But the announcement never happened, and the video wasn’t real. Just 12 hours later, the post quietly disappeared from his feed.
The clip, which was obviously AI-generated, showed Lara Trump on Fox News discussing Trump’s supposed launch of “medbed” hospitals — a conspiracy theory on the far-right fringe. In the same video, a digital version of Donald Trump declared that every American would soon receive their own “medbed card,” granting access to facilities “designed to restore every citizen to full health and strength.”
Trump tonight appears to have pushed the false "medbed" conspiracy theory, which has spread in the far-right internet over the years. https://t.co/L1MBPIU4ON pic.twitter.com/wWBQPDFbnb
— Alex Kaplan (@AlKapDC) September 28, 2025
For those unfamiliar, “medbeds” are a popular QAnon myth that claims shadowy forces in government have access to futuristic healing pods capable of curing all illnesses. Some conspiracy believers even go so far as to insist that one has been used to keep former President John F. Kennedy alive.
The true source of the video is murky. Investigative journalist Jacqueline Sweet noted on X that the video seemed to trace back to an Instagram profile under the name Dr. David Richard Simon — a name she said is “a common fake name for fake doctors in romance scams.”
Trump reportedly shared the clip in the middle of a late-night posting binge, during which he boosted multiple videos from right-wing outlets. This makes it entirely plausible that he simply reposted the “medbed” announcement without realizing it was fabricated, perhaps even forgetting that he had never made such a promise in the first place. Still, others suggest he may have been amplifying the conspiracy deliberately, signaling to extremists in his base or simply trolling those who care about truth versus fiction.
Regardless of intent, the idea that the president would effectively “announce” a fake medical breakthrough — only to retract it hours later — is deeply unsettling.
