The President Shared a Snuff Film. The Family Begged Him to Stop. He Posted an AI Cartoon Instead.

William Chapman was 23. He was mentally ill. He died in a tiger enclosure. His family asked for privacy. The President of the United States made content out of it.

Honestly, I don’t know where to start with this one. Every time I think we’ve hit the bottom, someone kicks a hole in the floor and proves me wrong.

A 23-year-old man is dead. His name was William Chapman.

His family is devastated, and I mean that for real, not in the way a PR statement says it. They asked people to stop sharing the video of his final moments because it was causing them “severe distress at an exceptionally vulnerable time.” They described him as a bright, warm, engaging young man who was struggling with serious mental illness and had been prescribed strong medication. That’s the context. At the center of this is a human being, not content.

So what did the President of the United States do? He posted the video to his 13 million followers on Truth Social, with the caption “Don’t ever mess with nature! President DJT”. Then the White House’s “Rapid Response 47” account shared it too, to another 2.3 million people.

As if that weren’t enough, he then posted an AI-generated video of himself wrestling a tiger, befriending it, smiling, all set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

Look, I’m not clutching my pearls. I don’t expect politicians to be saints. I’ve watched Trump for ten years, and I’m immune to a lot of it. The tweets, the rallies, the nicknames, covfefe. I’ve rolled my eyes and moved on more times than I can count, and you do get numb.

But this is different. It isn’t a policy disagreement or a bad joke or a mean tweet. It’s a president treating a young man’s death like a meme, a punchline, something to farm for engagement.

The family begged people to stop sharing that video, and his answer was to make sure millions more saw it. There was no public interest in that footage. It doesn’t teach anyone anything, and it doesn’t make anyone safer. He did it because he could, because it would get attention, because in his world everything is content and attention is the only currency that matters.

Then comes the AI video, where he’s the hero who tames the tiger that killed a real person. A tragedy turned into a cartoon he gets to win, with a jaunty song and a smile and a thumbs up. I keep searching for the right word for that and “grotesque” is the closest I can get.

This isn’t about free speech. Nobody is saying he doesn’t have the legal right to post it. He does. My point is that there used to be a line between a crass politician and someone who profits off human suffering in real time. Between disagreeing with a person and dancing on their grave. Between being shameless and being cruel. I think we erased that line.

What really gets me is that even his own supporters are calling him out. Go read the comments on the White House post. “Sick.” “Disgusting.” “I’m a big supporter but not a fan of this post.” “Mr President please take this down.” These are people who voted for him and defend him against everything, and they looked at this and said it was too much. When your own base thinks you’ve gone too far, maybe you actually have.

He won’t apologize, though, and he won’t take it down. He’ll double down, because that’s what he always does. In a week this will be a footnote, the news cycle will move on, and there will be another outrage and another post that makes us gasp before we forget. That’s the pattern.

And that’s the real tragedy here, more than the post itself. We’ve built a world where he can do this and nothing happens. Outrage is loud and brief, like a firework, and then it’s gone. The family of a dead 23-year-old has to watch the President use their son’s death as content, and there’s no mechanism, no consequence, no one in the White House willing to say, “Sir, you can’t do that.”

I don’t have a clever ending. I don’t have a solution or a five-point plan or a call to action. I just have a feeling in my chest that won’t go away, a mix of anger and exhaustion and something close to grief. For William Chapman. For his family, who have to grieve in public because the President decided their worst moment was his content. For the fact that this is where we are now.

The President shared what amounts to a snuff film, the White House amplified it, and the family of the dead man begged for it to stop. I don’t know how anyone reads that and feels anything but sick.

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