 "Office televisions were displaying a video featuring US President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, who is leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge). Image Courtesy: @ajlamesa/X")
On Monday, employees at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) were greeted with a quite odd sight.
Office televisions were displaying a video featuring US President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, who is leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).
The video showed Trump enthusiastically kissing Musk’s feet, with the text, “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING.”
The short clip has stunned employees who were returning to the office following an executive order that ended the working-from-home policy.
Here’s the truth about the video.
The Trump-Musk video
Vox journalist Rachel Cohen first reported the incident of the 19-second video displayed throughout HUD’s building on Monday.
Its visuals were broadcast by an X account owned by Anthony Lamesa.
The video, which was captioned with a text that read, “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING,” was played on a loop for five minutes on screens inside the Robert C Weaver Federal Building, including in the cafeteria, according to journalist Maria Kabas.
An unnamed HUD employee told Wired that federal workers had to manually turn off each television to stop the video from playing.
The truth
According to media outlets, the video appears to be an artificial intelligence (AI) generated one.
It is currently unclear who was behind the prank.
“Another waste of taxpayer dollars and resources,” HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett told Wired, adding, “Appropriate action will be taken for all involved.”
The White House and Musk did not comment on the situation.
However, Democrats on the US House Committee on Financial Services account took a jab at Trump and Musk, saying, “Not all heroes wear capes…” Condemning the reaction, HUD Secretary Scott Turner’s representatives responded, “There is nothing heroic about abusing taxpayer resources.”
Notably, similar AI-generated videos and images of Trump kissing Musk’s feet have been shared on social media since last year.
Musk has also not publicly commented on them.
The bromance
Trump and Musk’s equation has been under intense scrutiny ever since the Tesla CEO funded the president’s 2024 election campaign and pushed his way into the White House via the so-called informal advisory agency, Doge.
In fact, in an interview with Fox News anchor Sean Hannity last week, the pair even said that they believe the media is attempting to sour relations between them.
Trump said that the billionaire called him because of the rumours circulating about their connection.
“Actually, Elon called me. He said, ‘You know they’re trying to drive us apart.’ I said, ‘Absolutely,’” Trump recalled.
Soon, Hannity interjected and remarked, “This is going to be hard. I feel like I’m interviewing the two brothers.”
Analysts believe that the two will ultimately lose their bromance .
“The Trump Show is a one-man play. And there’s no room for anybody else, least of all somebody wealthier and with a (nearly) comparable thirst for attention,” Politico’s senior political columnist Jonathan Martin wrote earlier this month.
Rick Wilson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a pro-democracy group that released an attack ad titled “President Musk”, was quoted by The Guardian: “They will collide eventually. When Trump sees Elon causing political damage to him, he’ll cut the cord in a hot minute."
“It won’t even take five heartbeats. Once he sees that Elon is dragging him down in the polling – and Elon has become spectacularly unpopular in the last few weeks – Elon’s going to have a rough moment.”
Musk’s plan to halve HUD workforce
Musk, dubbed the president’s “first buddy,” over the weekend, telegraphed an extraordinary request to federal workers, including employees at HUD, explaining “approx. five bullets of what you accomplished last week.”
Failure to provide the work summary would be considered a resignation, the email said.
According to a HUD insider who spoke to Wired, the leadership instructed staff to hold off on taking any action until at least noon on Monday, while leadership at several other agencies and federal workers’ unions advised their members not to reply to the emails .
Documents recently leaked revealed Musk-led Doge’s proposal to cut the country’s crisis-beleaguered house agency’s staff in half.
HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development is expected to lay off 84 per cent of its employees, according to papers that were hacked, as NPR reported this last week.
“We’ve decided internally to start notifying our grantees – every mayor, county head, governor, nonprofit CEO, and congressional earmark recipient – that they should anticipate a loss or significant unpredictable delay in funding,” a current HUD employee told Wired.
Over the past two weeks, Musk’s Doge has asserted that they have cancelled at least $4 million in DEI contracts and retrieved $1.9 billion in HUD funds that were “misplaced” by the previous Joe Biden-led government. There were also several mistakes in the figures on the public listing of the billions of dollars in alleged savings that Doge is generating, as per the report.
During the first month of Trump’s administration, thousands of federal employees have been forced out — either by being fired or offered a buyout — as Doge’s tells agency leaders to plan for “large-scale reductions in force” and freeze trillions of dollars in federal grant funds.
While there is no official figure available for the total firings or layoffs so far, the Associated Press has tallied hundreds of thousands of workers who are being affected. The cuts include thousands at the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Defence, Health and Human Services, the Internal Revenue Service and the National Park Service, among others.
With inputs from agencies