A strange video making the rounds on social media had people scratching their heads this week after it appeared to show someone tossing a black bag out of a second-story White House window. But President Trump said Tuesday it was almost certainly a fake.
“Probably AI-generated,” Trump told reporters when asked about the viral clip. He dismissed it outright, pointing out that the White House windows aren’t the kind that can just be opened. “You can’t open the windows. They’re all heavily armored and bullet-proof,” he said.
The clip first popped up on an Instagram account called “Washingtonianprobs” before quickly spreading across platforms. In it, a person wearing white pants steps onto a windowsill on the second floor of the White House and drops what looks like a large black trash bag. A second object—something long and white—gets tossed out after. The second floor is known as the level where the president’s private residence is located, which added fuel to the speculation.
People online had fun with it, making jokes about White House security and wild guesses about what could be inside the bag. The curiosity only grew when a White House official gave TIME a statement earlier in the day that seemed to confirm the footage showed something real.
“It was a contractor who was doing regular maintenance while the President was gone,” the official said, adding no further details about what exactly was tossed out.
Trump, however, wasn’t having it. He doubled down during an Oval Office event, brushing off the video as phony. His remarks came after announcing that U.S. Space Command headquarters would be moving from Colorado to Alabama, a decision that stirred its own political chatter.
The timeline added another layer of intrigue. The video was filmed while Trump was away spending Sunday and Labor Day at his golf club in Sterling, Virginia. That left many wondering how something like this could happen at the White House while the president was out of town.
The conflicting explanations—Trump calling it fake and officials saying it was routine maintenance—didn’t do much to stop the online swirl. Instead, the mixed messages fueled even more questions about what people really saw and why the White House offered two very different takes in such a short window of time.
By Tuesday night, the bag video had become one of those internet mysteries with no clear answers. For now, it sits somewhere between a joke gone viral, a possible AI stunt, and an official attempt to brush off a strange moment caught on camera.