President Donald Trump posted an AI version of himself promoting a fake product called “medbeds” to his 10.8 million followers on Truth Social Friday night.
The clip takes the form of a phony Fox News report in which Lara Trump, the president’s daughter in-law, says Trump has announced “the nation’s first medbed hospitals” and that every American would receive a “medbed card.”
“Every American will soon receive their own MedBed card,” AI Trump says. “With it, you’ll have guaranteed access to our new hospitals led by the top doctors in the nation, equipped with the most advanced technology in the world.”
“Medbeds” is a conspiracy that has spread extensively through far-right, QAnon circles. The idea is that the American government has access to futuristic medical pods that can cure any disease and even regrow limbs, but liberals have been hiding this information from the American public. One sect of QAnon believes the government is using a medbed to keep JFK alive.
Other conspiracy theorists believe Donald Trump is aware of the technology. In 2021, a QAnon follower on Telegram made headlines for writing an open letter in which he begged then-citizen Trump to release medbeds to heal his ailing wife who was suffering from an auto-immune disease.
It’s unclear where the clip came from or why the president posted it. It was shared in the middle of a late-night posting spree in which Trump shared multiple clips from right-wing networks, an AI-generated drawing of Trump appearing to fire FED chair Jerome Powell, and a screenshot of a tweet by “@RedLineReportt” asking if people still watch movies featuring actor Robert De Niro.
The Daily Beast has reached out to The White House for comment.
Some companies have attempted to capitalize on the medbed conspiracy by promoting themselves as medbed-adjacent, though they stop short of selling the sci-fi pods envisioned by medbed believers. For example, Tesla BioHealing sells a “MedBed Generator,” which is a metal canister that patients place under their actual bed, for $11,000.
Speaking to The Daily Beast in 2022, Tesla BioHealing CEO James Liu insisted that the company did not want to be associated with the medbed hoax, but promised its products would deliver “life force energy” to sick people.