By John Bowden

Copyright independent

Donald Trump dove back into the world of weirder, nonpartisan conspiracies this week as his Truth Social account shared a video promoting the imaginary technology known by conspiracy theory believers as “Medbeds.”

Believers in the “Medbed” conspiracy think that the U.S. government has hidden this technology away from the American public for years, using it only on members of the military and politicians.

The beds do not exist — believers imagine a device straight out of a video game capable of healing wounds, regrowing limbs, curing diseases and more, technology which even fantasy writers would find fanciful.

But on Saturday, the president’s Truth Social account posted a video seemingly endorsing the conspiracies. The video itself, an AI creation, was deleted from Trump’s feed by Sunday morning. In it, the president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump anchors a fake Fox News segment promoting a new Trump administration healthcare plan she says will result in “MedBed hospitals” and “national Medbed card[s] for every citizen.”

“Every American will soon receive their own MedBed card,” an AI-generated Trump says in the video, the intonation of his voice dropping and turning robotic as he talked. “With it, you’ll have access to our new hospitals led by the top doctors in the nation.”

There are a handful of signs that give away the video as a clear fake: the low resolution quality of the clip, the uncanny valley feeling given off by Trump’s voice and the incorrect font used for the Fox News chyron. But the overall quality of the AI deepfake was clearly of sufficient quality to fool the president of the United States, or whoever made the post from his Truth Social account.

If Trump himself shared the video, it raises the questions of whether the president judged the video to be believable — including the clip of his AI-generated voice, which depicted him saying something he’d presumably never actually said.

The Independent reached out to the White House for comment.

As of Sunday afternoon, there was no statement from the White House or the president’s social media channels indicating to Trump’s followers that the video and the claims it contained were fake.

“Practitioners of so-called alternative medicine often claim their pseudoscientific treatment can help with just about anything, but even they stop short of affirming limb regeneration. There is no such limit for med beds, however. They can do anything,” noted Jonathan Jarry, an expert in misinformation at McGill University.

“Inexplicably, [believers in med beds] have embraced the notion that these all-healing med beds are currently in the possession of the military. Not just the U.S. Armed Forces, but a sort of alliance between all military forces in the world—famously, they all get along and work together, like at the end of the movie Independence Day, and war is a thing of the past,” Jarry added in an August blog post. “These benevolent military forces will be the ones rolling out the technology for public use. We will all get an appointment to go to a military base, lie down on one of these beds, and get healed from everything. The best part is it will be free.”

Also on Saturday, the president used his Truth Social account to amplify misinformation around the deployment of FBI agents on January 6, 2021.

His supporters were riled up by a report from the right-wing reporter John Solomon insinuating that hundreds of FBI agents were deployed in the crowd on January 6, which fed into conspiracy theories embraced by the far right blaming FBI “agitators” for causing violence that day.

FBI Director Kash Patel was then forced to clarify that those agents were deployed in response to the violence, not before it took place. He attempted to argue in a Saturday interview with Fox News that the deployment of FBI agents to assist a badly outnumbered U.S. Capitol Police was a scandal.

“Agents were sent into a crowd control mission after the riot was declared by Metro Police – something that goes against FBI standards,” Patel told Fox News. “This was the failure of a corrupt leadership that lied to Congress and to the American people about what really happened.”