Online critics are accusing Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick of posting a fake video of supposed pieces of the Kennedy Center ceiling collapsing.
Lutnick posted the video on his official X account as the Kennedy Center board voted to shut down for renovations. Lutnick, whose wife sits on the board, has previously called for closing the facility because its collapsing ceiling makes it "dangerous."
In his post, Lutnick wrote that the ceiling was "crashing violently" onto the center's main floor because of the "collapsing concrete" and "steel that is rotting." Just as President Donald Trump claimed on Tuesday, Lutnick wrote that a security guard avoided the falling ceiling "by just minutes," adding that "patrons could have been killed."
However, critics quickly pointed out details in the video posted by Lutnick that cast doubt on the authenticity of the video and the legitimacy of Lutnick's demands for a Kennedy Center shutdown.
"Did you call in sick before it collapsed?" asked former FBI agent Phil Kennedy.
"Why was the yellow caution sign in the exact place where the ceiling fell in, before it fell in?" wondered Andrew Feinberg, a White House correspondent for The Independent.
"This is the most staged s— I've ever seen," wrote progressive political commentator Mike Nellis.
"Security cameras don't point low on to the ground," noted political consultant and journalist Adam Cochran. "The way that shatters looks more like a bad AI edit than a slow frame security camera."
Others simply tore into Lutnick and Trump's continued demand for the closure of the Kennedy Center and that it bear Trump's name.
"Yes, a worthy cause, practically a matter of national honor," national media writer Paul Farhi sarcastically commented. "Any president would surely want to pitch in and help raise the funds for this important institution, without demanding anything in return for so solemn a mission. Wouldn't you agree?"
Legal expert Adam Klasfeld pointed to Washington Post reporting from 1977 about plaster falling from the ceiling of Kennedy Center's Grand Foyer.
"Did then-President Jimmy Carter stack the Kennedy Center's Board to shut it down for (an estimated) two years and try to extort the courts to allow his surrogates to rededicate it as a $250M shrine to himself?" Klasfeld asked. "No, the Center went on with the show and fixed the damn ceiling."