A top-ranking Republican senator compared Donald Trump to a playful “little boy” as he tried to defend a crude AI video posted by the president in a shutdown standoff with Democrats.
“Couldn’t the president just say, ‘These demands are ridiculous,’ and not post a video with Hakeem Jeffries wearing a sombrero, and you know, putting that voice over Senator Schumer talking about people of color and immigrants?” CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins put it to Sen. Roger Marshall on Monday evening.
Trump had posted the clip to Truth Social following an unproductive White House sit-down with Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, who lead the Democratic minorities in the House and Senate. The clip featured Jeffries sporting a traditional Mexican hat and moustache as mariachi music plays in the background, while an AI dub of Schumer boasts about handing “illegal aliens free health care.”
“Nobody likes Democrats anymore, we have no voters left because of all of our woke, trans bulls–t. Not even Black people want to vote for us anymore, even Latinos hate us,” the AI-dubbed Schumer says, before describing Democrats as “a bunch of woke pieces of s---.”
The clip was attacked as not only offensive but flippant, given the possibility that thousands of federal workers could be out of a job if a funding deal is not reached by Wednesday. “Is that appropriate, in your view?” Collins asked Marshall.
The Kentucky senator proffered something of a bizarre response. “Look, I think sometimes the president plays with the press, like a little boy and a flashlight and a dog,” he said.
“He’s shining the flashlight here, and he’s shining it there,” Marshall went on. “What he’s saying is, this offer from the Democrats is ridiculous—$1.5 trillion on top of funding that they already agreed to—that what they’re asking for is completely ridiculous, it’s disingenuous.”
Collins then pointed out this was not, in fact, what had been articulated in the clip, before pressing Marshall again on whether he had “any objections to that video the president posted.”
“I tell you, I think it’s said in jest,” the senator replied. “I think it’s the president making fun of a couple of people that didn’t bring a serious request to the White House.”
