President Donald Trump watched a viral clip from the Oval Office on Tuesday and brushed it off as “AI,” even as a White House official said the eyebrow-raising video simply showed a contractor doing routine maintenance.
The moment came during Trump’s on-camera announcement that U.S. Space Command’s headquarters will move from Colorado to Huntsville, Alabama, a reversal of the Biden-era decision and the president’s splashy bid to put the narrative back on policy.
🚨 BREAKING: Peter Doocy shows President Trump the VIRAL video of stuff being dumped out of the White House window – Trump says IT’S AI.
“No, that’s probably AI-generated. You can’t open the windows. They’re all heavily-armored. I know every window up there. The last place I’d… pic.twitter.com/8bcSImf0W1
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 2, 2025
The short video, first posted Monday by the Instagram account “Washingtonianprobs,” shows a person in white pants stepping onto a second-floor windowsill of the White House and tossing what looks like a black bag to the ground, followed by a long white item.
The second floor houses the presidential residence, which set off a fresh round of jokes and conspiracy theories about what, exactly, was being pitched out. The White House’s explanation was quick and plain, a contractor doing regular maintenance while the president was away.
Trump had spent Sunday and Monday at his golf club in Sterling, Virginia, and returned to the cameras Tuesday to tout the Space Command relocation and swat down days of online chatter about his health. He dismissed the viral window clip as digital trickery, saying the doors are sealed and cannot be opened, and insisting people were panicking just because he skipped public events for a couple of days. Whatever Trump said about the clip, the official line from his own building stayed consistent, it was maintenance, not a security breach or anything more dramatic.
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The maintenance explanation tracked with what fact-checkers heard too. The footage was authentic, and a White House spokesperson confirmed it depicted a contractor at work. That did little to slow the internet rumor mill, which had already been buzzing after Trump’s weeklong absence and a flurry of speculative posts about his health. As usual, TikTok detectives and X threads had their theories, while more sober voices pointed out that the White House is constantly under renovation and upkeep.
Policy wise, Trump tried to seize the upper hand by unveiling the Alabama move. The decision would reverse President Joe Biden’s 2023 call to keep the command in Colorado Springs, a fight that has simmered for years between two states with serious space pedigrees. Defense officials have previously warned the shift could cost millions and take years, but Trump framed it as a patriotic win and an overdue correction, with Alabama’s “Rocket City” heritage front and center.
Still, the image that stuck with many viewers was the Oval Office watch party for that odd window toss. The clip’s journey from Instagram to national headlines happened fast, which is how these things go now. Reports spelled out the basic facts, the poster, the second-floor vantage, the contractor explanation, the president’s golf weekend, and the scheduled Oval Office hit.
Seen in that light, Tuesday’s appearance felt like a two-fer, an announcement designed to drown out the rumors and a rebuttal to the latest viral mystery. Whether calling it “AI” changes any minds is another matter. The official word says maintenance, the cameras caught something weird, and the internet did what the internet does.
