President Donald Trump shared a bizarre artificial intelligence-generated video on Truth Social that depicts him wrestling a tiger and later embracing the animal. The digital creation is an apparent reimagining of a fatal incident at the Yorkshire Wildlife Park near Doncaster, England, where a man named William Chapman entered a tiger enclosure and was killed.
The AI video features the tiger initially standing over the American leader before Trump rises, chases the animal, and tackles it to the ground. The sequence is set to the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight and concludes with a peaceful hug between Trump and the big cat.
Prior to sharing the AI creation, Trump posted actual footage of the English man being attacked by the tiger alongside the caption warning people not to mess with nature. He later followed up with an uncaptioned compilation of various wild big cats attacking humans, some of which reports indicate were also generated using artificial intelligence.
The social media activity occurred while Trump was traveling to Alaska ahead of a scheduled rally speech in the city of Wasilla, located north of Anchorage.
The underlying real-world incident involved Chapman scaling a fence to enter the habitat of a 200-kilogram male Siberian tiger named Altai. The attack lasted only a brief duration, and Chapman was pronounced dead at the scene.
Following the circulation of the footage, Chapman's family released a statement expressing devastation over their loss and condemning the spread of offensive media content that has caused them severe distress. Family members noted that Chapman had suffered from significant mental illness for years and asked the public to respect the ongoing coroner's process while remembering him as a warm, bright individual.