Trump's Controversial AI Video: Project 2025 Architect as Grim Reaper

Trump Posts Bizarre AI Video of Project 2025 Architect as the Grim Reaper

President Donald Trump posted some new videos to Truth Social late Thursday, continuing his tradition of pushing out the most bizarre content ever distributed by a U.S. president. One of the videos was AI-generated and features OMB Director Russ Vought as the Grim Reaper... and President Trump playing a cowbell. The video, posted around 10:40 p.m. ET, is set to a parody version of Blue Ã-yster Cult's 1976 hit song "Don't Fear the Reaper" and opens with a stormy rendering of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., including figures draped in long black robes. One of the figures is revealed to be President Trump, hitting a cowbell that doesn't sync to the music in any way, while another is Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought was a key architect of Project 2025, the conservative plan to gut the federal government, which Trump and his allies tried to pretend wasn't actually Trump's plan during the 2024 presidential campaign. "Now their time has come. Here, the power's gone," the song opens with a shot of the Capitol. "Russ Vought is the Reaper. He wields the pen, the funds and the brain." The song goes on, describing Democrats as "babies" and showing Vought as the man who will make devastating cuts to the federal workforce. Two sombreros also appear, something that's become a bit of a meme on the racist right. The idea is that Democrats have shut down the government because they want to give health care money to undocumented immigrants, something that's not true but has been repeated incessantly by Trump and his allies in Congress. The government shutdown is on day three, and there's no end in sight, as the Republicans control both the House and Senate. The video posted by Trump appears to have been produced by the Dilley Meme Team, a collective of online video creators founded by Brenden Dilley. The group makes pro-Trump content and dabbles in the promotion of QAnon, the conspiracy theory that Trump and the Republicans are secretly working against a cabal of baby-eating predators in the Democratic Party. Yet this new video doesn't exactly cast Trump and his allies as the guys coming in to save the day. Honestly, Vought as the Reaper is probably a fair representation of his goals. Shortly before the 2024 presidential election, Vought said he wanted to cause federal workers trauma, and that's precisely what the administration has been doing, long before the government shutdown. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,†Vought said in 2024, according to a video obtained by ProPublica. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains." Obviously, a video depicting Vought as the Grim Reaper casts him as the villain in the eyes of most people. But that's really beside the point. Far-right politicians increasingly seem confused about who counts as the good guys. "We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma," Vought continued. But all of the threats that Vought has been making aren't so intimidating now. Trump has unilaterally cut the federal workforce and funding for programs both at home and abroad, with devastating consequences. After the past nine months of Trump taking a chainsaw to the federal government (often with the help of Elon Musk and DOGE), there's a real question of how much more they can cut. There's also the question of whether Trump even knows what's being posted to his social media accounts and what kinds of unhinged AI-generated content might be next. The president posted an AI video of himself last weekend promoting something called "med beds," a QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theory that magical beds can cure all disease but are being suppressed by the pharmaceutical industry. Trump also posted an AI video Thursday night showing him throwing a "Trump 2028" hat on the head of Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the top-ranking Democrat in the House. The video has some subtle clues that it might be AI, including just the fact that Trump wouldn't be coordinated enough to pull off tossing a hat like that, but it's going to get increasingly harder to tell what's fake in our current environment. OpenAI launched a Sora app this week that makes extremely realistic-looking AI video content. And while it's invite-only right now, the tools to make very convincing fakes are becoming more commonplace. Trump and his allies aren't serious people, even if they control all the levers of power. And a reporter asked Speaker of the House Mike Johnson about the way that his party trolls Democrats with these ridiculous videos. "What they're trying to have fun with, trying to make light of, is to point out the absurdity of the Democrats' position. And they're using memes and all the tools of social media to do that," Johnson said. "Some people find that entertaining, but at the end of the day, the decisions are hard ones, and I'm telling you, they're not taking any pleasure in that."

'Vought is the reaper': Trump posts Project 2025 AI music video ahead of threatened shutdown layoffs

US President Donald Trump once again released a new series of AI-generated videos, this time featuring Russell Vought and Vice President JD Vance. This latest post comes after critics condemned the 47th POTUS' earlier AI-generated videos, calling it bizarre, offensive, and even dangerous. Among the clips Trump shared was a surreal music video in which his budget director Russell Vought, architect of the controversial Project 2025, is depicted as the Grim Reaper, set to an AI-generated cover of Blue Öyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper." The video also shows Trump leading a band with Vance on drums, while baby-faced Democrats with sombreros and moustaches appear onscreen.