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AI video of Trump kissing Elon Musk's toes goes viral after pranksters hack HUD building
Donald Trump and Elon Musk during UFC 309 at Madison Square Garden on November 16, 2024 in New York City.
"Long live the real king," read the bleak caption.
Creative pranksters targeted a federal building this week with an AI-generated video highlighting the resentment over Elon Musk’s growing power within the U.S. government.
On Monday morning, TV screens throughout the Department of Housing and Urban Development building in Washington, D.C., began looping a video clip showing Donald Trump kissing, sucking on, and essentially caressing Musk’s (two left) feet.
"LONG LIVE THE REAL KING," read a large, all-caps text overlay across the screen.
According to a Bluesky post from independent journalist Marisa Kabas, the video looped for about five minutes before it was shut down.
"Building staff couldn’t figure out how to turn it off so sent people to every floor to unplug TVs," she wrote.
It’s still unclear who pulled off the prank, or how, but the likely message behind it requires little interpretation. Musk has spent the last several weeks bulldozing various federal agencies, laying off employees en masse and making public claims of widespread corruption using misinterpreted data that many Americans don’t think he should ever have been allowed access to in the first place.
That an unelected billionaire has been given so much power in Trump’s administration (and has extended some of that power to similarly unelected young adults) has been extremely contentious. Drawing attention to that in a federal building — on the day government employees lost the option to work from home, at least partially by Musk’s demand — makes sense.
"Staff have viewed this as a sign of resistance that has brought a lot of joy," an anonymous HUD employee told NBC News.
Meanwhile, HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett lamented to The Independent that it was "another waste of taxpayer dollars and resources." Presumably, whatever taxpayer resourceswere drained by employees walking around shutting off TVs for five minutes will bounce back more quickly than those created by the tax cuts Trump wants to give billionaires.
Online, MAGAs echoed Lovett, calling for whomever enabled the video to be fired. Some even suggested this was grounds for lifetime imprisonment or dismantling HUD entirely — super normal responses to the egregious "crime" of insulting an elected official.
Other responses were more mindful of exactly why this is happening to begin with.
"Looks like somebody at HUD found a great answer for Elon's what did you do this week? questionnaire."
"Hearing that nobody knew how to turn off the videos or TVs, so folks had to manually unplug every screen. Feels like an apt metaphor for these horrifying times. In not funny news, HUD will cut 84% of staff from a key office that focuses on solving homelessness."
"This would be the moment I'd tell Elon to gather all his inside sunglasses and his petite Nazis with their swoop bangs and get the hell outta my sight forever."
"VEEP was a documentary and this insurrectionist presidency is an abomination and global embarrassment."
Rachel Kiley is presumably a writer and definitely not a terminator. She can usually be found crying over queerbaiting in the Pitch Perfect franchise or on Twitter, if not both.
Rachel Kiley is presumably a writer and definitely not a terminator. She can usually be found crying over queerbaiting in the Pitch Perfect franchise or on Twitter, if not both.
