An AI-generated video of Donald Trump kissing Elon Musk’s bare feet played on monitors the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
As Donald Trump and Elon Musk prepare to bring their next round of arbitrary cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, it seems like at least one employee is making their displeasure known. On Monday morning, the first day of the Trump administration’s “return to office” ban on remote work, employees at HUD were greeted by a feat of digital protest — or a “foot” of one.
According to videos and photos circulated on social media, televisions at HUD’s central office in Washington, D.C., were hijacked to play an AI-generated video of Trump making sweet, sloppy oral love to Musk’s bare feet. The words “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING” were emblazoned over the visual, likely a reference to recent posts from Trump and the White House describing the president as “the king.”
In a statement, HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett said that the stunt was “another waste of taxpayer dollars and resources” and that “appropriate action will be taken for all involved.”
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically-affected. We want --- when they wake up in the morning, we want them not to want not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. 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.
--- Russ Vought, current head of OPM (the federal government's "HR office"), in a 2023 talk
I'd say that he's probably successfully managed to get the "harming morale" part down, at any rate.
On a related note, I wonder whether it's actually mandatory to have that portrait of the current President hung on the wall you see in a lot of federal agencies. A lot of them do, but I don't know whether that's actually a requirement.
VERIFY: Are government agencies required to display portraits of current presidents?
We turned to the U.S. General Services Administration, the GSA, to verify our viewer’s question. The simple answer is no, according to the Office of Strategic Communication for GSA, which is an independent agency of the U.S. government that helps manage federal agencies.
It’s response: “There is no regulation that specifies that federal agencies must display portraits of the sitting President and Vice President in the space they occupy. However, GSA displays portraits of the President and Vice President in the public areas of the buildings that GSA owns and operates, including locations leased by GSA, where the building is fully occupied by the federal government.”
I don't know if you're likely to see Trump-kissing-Musk's-feet video displays showing up en masse, but I could certainly imagine agencies removing the portrait of Trump, if there's no requirement to display it.