President Donald Trump's social media activity over the weekend raises troubling questions about his ability to tell fact from fiction, an analyst wrote Monday.
The president posted a baffling AI-generated video of himself in a fake Fox News segment announcing a miraculous — and fictitious — "med bed" device that can restore full health to anyone. Meanwhile, his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, ordered 200 members of the Oregon National Guard into Portland based on 2020 footage broadcast by Fox News, wrote Salon's Sophia Tesfaye.
"Trump defenders, as they are often wont to do, rushed to laugh off the incident as a harmless joke," Tesfaye wrote abou the Med Bed post. "But a quick social media search reveals that a lot of people who are dying or watching a loved one fade away with cancer and other illnesses really believed it. QAnon-type spaces were excited at the possibility that Trump would finally release all the hidden cures."
"Many MAGA believers have refused medical treatment because they believe med bed tech will restore their health in minutes," she added. "This is both depraved and heartbreaking."
The post was made as Trump seems ready to allow the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced health insurance subsidies expire, and his tax bill has already put rural hospitals at risk, but his moves against immigration protests are just as delusional, wrote Tesfave.
"As the med bed example demonstrates, Trump is growing more vulnerable to being influenced by selective or sensational media coverage — and less likely to vet whether what he is seeing or hearing on those segments is grounded in current facts," Tesfaye wrote.
"In another instance from Saturday, he took Fox News visuals and narrative frames — this time real, although outdated — to order consequential real world action in Portland."
Trump told Portland Mayor G. Tina Kotek the city was "under attack," which she assured him was not true, and a lawsuit filed by the city and the state of Oregon referred to a recent Fox News report cited by the president that used footage recorded during 2020 protests.
"Perhaps most bizarrely, Trump seems to understand the perils of his media diet," Tesfaye wrote. "Evan Watson of Portland’s KGW8 reported that the president told NBC News’ Yamiche Alcindor during a Sunday interview that pushback from Oregon’s governor on his troop deployment caused him to briefly question things. 'I spoke to the governor, she was very nice,' Trump said. 'But I said, Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different. They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place…it looks like terrible.'”