Halloween isn’t until October 31, but that didn’t stop President Trump from dropping an AI-generated music video tailor-made for spooky season, like a battery-powered candle in a jack-o’-lantern. In a 67-second clip on Truth Social, he casts his own budget director, Russell Vought, as the Grim Reaper—cape, scythe, the works.
In the clip, the reaper “wields the pen, the funds and the brain,” gliding down a shadowy hallway past portraits of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer like it’s a haunted-house tour of congressional grievances. This is not satire. This is official messaging from the White House during a shutdown. Watch below:
Why the costume change? The administration is prepping mass federal layoffs tied to the funding lapse, “likely… in the thousands,” per press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and Trump says he met with Vought to decide which “Democrat agencies” to cut and whether those cuts stick. The video arrives as branding for a policy push, featuring layoffs, spending freezes, and program cancellations framed as a cleansing of the bureaucracy, now accompanied by Halloween-store iconography.
Vought, for his part, isn’t just playing reaper on screen—he’s swinging the scythe in the real world. During the shutdown, OMB has frozen billions, including $2.1B for Chicago transit and a larger pause on New York projects, with the administration citing bans on “race-based contracting.” Blue cities say it’s political payback; the White House calls it compliance and accountability. Either way, trains are collateral in a meme war. Watch below:
If you’re feeling déjà vu from campaign-season culture battles, you’re not wrong. Vought has also touted cancellations of $8B in climate-related funding across states that backed Democrats in 2024, moves now folded into the shutdown narrative about cutting “waste” and “woke.” The legal fights over what can actually be frozen are already humming in the background.
Meanwhile, the Senate is teeing up another vote on dueling stopgaps, but even optimists think the lights-out stretch could last at least a week. So yes: the government is partially closed, the reaper is trending, and thousands of real jobs may hang on a storyline written by AI. America, you contain multitudes.
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