The Trump administration is batting away questions about mysterious objects that were tossed out of a White House window.
On Monday, an Instagram account called “Washingtonianprobs” posted a clip showing a person dressed in white heaving what appeared to be a black trash bag as well as multiple unidentified objects out of a top-floor White House window.
The White House said in a statement to Time on Tuesday that the mysterious bag drop was due to “regular maintenance.”
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“It was a contractor who was doing regular maintenance while the President was gone,” the White House official said.
The video was widely shared on social media on Monday, with commenters poking fun at the president as speculation swirls that his health has taken a nosedive.
President Trump will make an announcement on Tuesday afternoon focused on the U.S. Space Force—but his physical appearance is likely to steal the show.
“Melania throwing his catheters, IV’s, and compression socks out the window,” joked one commenter on the video. The room attached to the window in the video is typically inhabited by the president’s family.
“Probably the Epstein Files!” said another user responding to the video, receiving more than 18,000 likes.
In recent weeks, Trump has been photographed with bruising on both of his hands, which the White House has chalked up to the president shaking “thousands” of hands.
He has also exhibited severely swollen “cankles”—likely a result of the circulation issue he was diagnosed with in July—and struggled to walk a straight line during his meeting with Vladimir Putin.
The president was at his Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, while the video was posted.
After a journalist posted the president’s public schedule for the weekend, which featured no public events from Saturday through Monday, the topics “Trump is dead” and “Trump died” started trending on X.
But when photographers documented him at his club on Saturday, they (mostly) ended a period of frenzied social media posting about the president’s mortality.
The president responded to the death-rumor deluge with a barrage of over 40 Truth Social posts on Saturday night, many of them featuring AI-generated images of himself.
So far in his second term, Trump has redesigned the Rose Garden, released plans for a new $200 million ballroom, and taken an impromptu tour of the White House roof (not far from the window the unknown objects were tossed through on Monday).
His stream of posts on Saturday included a rant about incompetent contractors scratching a limestone pathway in the Rose Garden.
“I’ll replace the stone, charge the contractor, and never let that contractor work at the White House again... we caught them, cold,” Trump wrote on Saturday about the alleged gardening snafu.
Perhaps Trump has found a new White House contractor who decided to take a different approach to trash removal on Monday.
