WASHINGTON — A short video spreading rapidly on social media since November 4 purports to show President Donald Trump swinging a baseball bat at furniture and decorative objects inside the Oval Office, supposedly in anger after the Republican Party's heavy defeat in the 2026 midterm elections. The clip, about ten seconds long, shows a man in a dark suit and red tie smashing items in what appears to be the president's office. It does not show a real event.

What the video shows

The footage circulated widely on X within hours of the midterm results, with posts presenting it as genuine footage of the president losing his temper. The clip was shared in several versions, some cropped to remove the labels that give it away. According to fact-checkers who examined the original posts, the video was first posted on November 4, the day after the elections, and quickly drew millions of views as users debated whether the president had really wrecked his own office.

The evidence it is AI-generated

The clearest proof sits inside the footage itself. The video carries a visible on-screen label reading "AI GENERATED", along with a "CAM 03" tag in its frames, and the version examined by The Quint's WebQoof desk on November 7 was found to carry the same label. When the clip was run through the University at Buffalo's DeepFake-O-Meter, three separate detectors flagged it as AI-generated, and Google's SynthID Detector found an invisible watermark indicating the content was generated or edited using OpenAI tools. A reverse image search turned up no credible news organisation carrying the footage as real, and the clip was also flagged as fake by Grok, the social platform's own AI assistant, as users shared it.

What actually happened after the midterms

The claim borrows its credibility from a real result. Democrats did win control of both chambers of Congress on November 3, taking the House and the Senate in a rebuke to the president, as reported by the Associated Press and confirmed in our own results study. President Trump publicly congratulated the Democrats and spoke to news networks after the results, and the political fallout — including the House speaker stepping aside — played out in public statements, not in any incident inside the White House. No White House statement, wire-service report or official record describes the president damaging property, and no credible outlet has reported any such episode. An incident of that kind, in the most photographed room in American politics, would have been covered within minutes by every major outlet.

Our finding

The video is synthetic. It was generated with AI tools, carries an AI-generated label and a detectable watermark, and the event it depicts never happened. The midterm defeat it supposedly reacts to is real — the wrecking of the Oval Office is not. Readers should treat dramatic post-election clips of public figures with the same check: look for the AI label, and check whether any reputable news organisation has reported the underlying event. For the latest verified developments from Washington, see our politics coverage.