Essay
He Thinks He is Teflon
How the POTUS posted an AI video of himself in the place of the man who was mauled to death by a tiger, and in his version ends up hugging it.
On Saturday afternoon William Chapman, who was 23, went into the tiger enclosure at Yorkshire Wildlife Park, near Doncaster, and was killed. Someone filmed it. The park and South Yorkshire Police asked people not to share the footage.
On Tuesday the President of the United States posted it to Truth Social. Forty-one seconds of it, under the words “Don’t ever mess with nature! President DJT”. The White House’s Rapid Response account shared it on X.
Next came a compilation of big cats attacking people, set to music, and then an AI video. In that one a tiger stands over Trump. He tells it off, gets up, chases it and wrestles it down, and the clip ends with the two of them hugging while “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays.
Asked for comment, the White House pointed Newsweek to the posts.
A family in this country
His family’s tribute calls him “a bright, warm and engaging young man whom his family dearly loved”, and says that “William loved them back”. As a boy he acted on ITV and the BBC, and the Jackie Palmer Stage School in High Wycombe said this week that they “loved watching William grow, both as a person and as a performer”.
They say he had “significant mental illness over a number of years” and was on strong medication, and that it is for the coroner to decide whether his illness contributed to his death. The inquest is due to open in Doncaster on Thursday. That is where the question belongs, and I’m leaving it there.
In the first chapter of the book I said I’d stopped having opinions about American politics out loud, because I don’t vote there. I am making one exception.
This didn’t happen in America. It happened in South Yorkshire, to a family in this country, and the President of the United States answered it with a video of himself winning.
In August I wrote that I didn’t need to see the footage of people drowning in Tibet to understand what had happened there. I don’t need to see this either.
Nihil nisi bene
The kindest reading is that it was a warning. Ryan Fournier, who founded Students for Trump, read it that way: “When you cross boundaries and mess with wild animals, nature wins EVERY time.” A warning doesn’t need a real man being attacked, though, or a follow-up in which the President beats the tiger and makes friends with it.
Anyone else who posted that would lose their job, and should. In March 2011 Aflac dropped Gilbert Gottfried, the voice of its duck, within days of his jokes about the Japanese tsunami.
After Charlie Kirk was shot dead in September last year, dozens of Americans were sacked for what they had posted about his death. The Vice President, guest-hosting Kirk’s own show, told listeners: “So when you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. And, hell, call their employer.”
Some of those sackings were unfair. The rule underneath them is one I hold, and it’s old.
Diogenes Laertius credits it to Chilon of Sparta, one of the Seven Sages, who lived around 600 BC. We quote it in Latin: de mortuis nihil nisi bene, of the dead, nothing but good.
Make a joke of somebody’s death in public, and the people you work and live among are entitled to want nothing more to do with you.
So why not him?
Why nothing sticks
Being sacked or shunned needs somebody to do the sacking or the shunning: an employer, a sponsor, a platform, the people you work with. For him each of those is missing or on his side.
Twitter suspended him in January 2021, and he built his own platform. Truth Social is run by a company in which he is the largest shareholder. When an account called Republicans Against Trump wrote “Someone take Grandpa’s phone away”, it was describing a job that doesn’t exist.
The staff who might stop him are the ones posting for him. In February his account carried a video of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, set to the same song.
His press secretary told reporters to “stop the fake outrage”. The video came down after nearly twelve hours, the White House blamed a staffer, and Trump told the AP he “didn’t make a mistake”. This week it was the White House’s own account sharing the tiger footage.
The voters already knew. In November 2015, at a rally in Myrtle Beach, he flailed his arms in an apparent impression of Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter with a congenital condition that affects his joints.
That should have ended a campaign. He won a year later, and again in 2024.
And the outrage is part of what his audience is buying. I wrote in the first chapter that outrage is the packaging. To the people who read the tiger post the way Fournier did, each furious reply is more proof that their man says what others won’t.
Downing Street was asked about it. Andy Burnham’s official spokesman said: “I think obviously the family have made their position clear. Of course, we respect that position. I’m not going to comment on the president’s social media channels, he’s got a press secretary who can speak to that.”
Respecting that position would have meant saying the President was wrong to post the footage. Downing Street knows how. In November 2017, when Trump retweeted videos from Britain First, Theresa May’s spokesman said it was “wrong for the president to have done this”, and May said so herself the next day.
This week the same office hid behind the family’s wishes and called it respect. That is cowardice.
Pat Schroeder, a congresswoman from Colorado, came up with “Teflon” for Ronald Reagan in 1983, while she was frying eggs. Reagan’s coating was charm.
Trump’s is made of other things: a platform his own company runs, staff who post for him and take the blame when it goes wrong, voters who had seen it all before, and a British government that refers questions to his press secretary. He thinks he is Teflon, and on the evidence of eleven years he’s right.
I grew up in a country where people told jokes about the man at the top in their kitchens, to people they trusted. Mockery was what you had when you had nothing else. This week it ran the other way, from the most powerful office in the world to a 23-year-old who can’t answer.
His family published their tribute late on Tuesday, after the President’s first post. They said the circulation of “deeply offensive media content” was causing them “severe distress at an exceptionally vulnerable time”, and added: “We ask people to stop doing this.”
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