A White House aide's fake AI clip of his own party backfired

A fake AI video posted by a senior White House official on 26 September 2026, showing him and members of the Trump family spraying champagne on a luggage cart, drew much of its criticism from the president's own side of politics.

Dan Scavino, a deputy chief of staff and one of Donald Trump's longest-serving aides, posted the generated clip to several platforms, including X and Instagram. The video is not real: it depicts him in a tuxedo riding a gilded cart through an ornate room with his wife Erin Elmore and Eric and Lara Trump, with Trump walking into frame, scored to Pitbull's "Don't Stop the Party". In his Instagram caption, Scavino tied it to the state dinner for Xi Jinping held on 24 September, Mediaite reported.

"Being some of the post State Dinner party has gotten out, I felt inclined to share mine as well, in complete transparency, with the American People," he wrote, signing off with "GOD BLESS THE USA!!!"

Carrie Prejean Boller, a conservative activist removed from Trump's Religious Liberty Commission earlier this year, wrote: "You really have no shame, do you?" She added that many Americans cannot afford groceries, gas or a mortgage payment, and called it a "tone deaf AI video" of officials partying at the People's House, ending with "MAGA is dead." Meghan McCain's response was shorter: "One of my friends couldn't afford air conditioner this summer." The liberal commentator Harry Sisson described the moment as a "let them eat cake" situation, per Soap Central.

The timing explains the damage. Republicans are trying to run the November midterms on affordability, and a senior official choosing to publish a generated celebration is an optics problem rather than a technology one. A September Reuters/Ipsos poll put Trump's approval rating at 32%, the lowest of his political career, according to IBTimes.

What makes the episode worth a creator's attention is that nothing here was a deepfake scandal. The clip was posted by the man it depicts, and the backlash landed anyway. Generated video of a real person, published by that person, still reads to an audience as an administration choosing to spend its attention on champagne, and the story travelled on the gap between the picture and the grocery bill rather than on any question of authenticity.

Scavino's post on X was still up when this story was checked on 28 September 2026.

Portrait in the lead image: a photograph by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0.