We thought Donald Trump couldn’t sink any lower. Then he weighed in on the Yorkshire tiger attack

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What would be the “normal” reaction to the tragic death of a vulnerable man who climbed into a tiger enclosure at a wildlife park and was killed?

Sadness, grief? A thought for his family, perhaps, who paid tribute to 23-year-old William Chapman, calling him “bright, warm and engaging” and saying that he had suffered from “significant mental illness” over a number of years and had been prescribed “strong medication”. Respect, too, for the family’s wishes; after they said “the publication and circulation of deeply offensive media content is causing them severe distress at an exceptionally vulnerable time” and urged people not to share the video.

Or, if you’re the actual US president, Donald Trump: reposting a graphic video of the man being mauled to death anyway, on your own social media platform, Truth Social, with the caption: “Don’t ever mess with nature!” A minute later, Trump followed up the 41-second silent clip showing the rare Amur tiger, Altai, attacking Chapman, with a second video compilation of lion attacks on people, set to music, which may or may not have been AI.

And then, awfully, of course, he posted an AI-generated video of Trump himself wrestling a tiger to the floor. I’d say it was shocked – except it is hard to be shocked by Trump any more.

Grim, appalling, despicable – and that’s before we get to the actual attack. Yet it is entirely what we’ve come to expect from a man who appears to be in a race to the very bottom; from a White House so cruel and so callous that it thinks nothing of sharing footage of a man’s death to farm clicks.

The depressing thing is, it’s entirely in keeping. This is the same administration which has proposed live-streaming the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan for entertainment – the first public execution in more than a century. The same administration which allowed death row inmate Christa Pike to suffer through not just one – but two botched execution attempts by lethal injection. While human rights groups and the UN branded it cruel and a form of chemical torture, Trump said flippantly that it “shouldn’t be difficult”.

It is the same administration – led by the very same man – which has waged an illegal war on Iran and used social media to warn the entire nation that it would be obliterated: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to ​be brought back ​again,” Trump boasted in April, in a post on ​Truth ​Social. The same administration which pledged support for Ukraine, then turned around and courted its aggressor – Putin – in a bid to get cheap fuel.

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And it’s the exact same administration, and man, that puts viral reach over principle, always; which “memes” ICE raids and turns them into video games – an AI-generated image of an alligator in an ICE hat, a line of handcuffed immigrants being boarded onto a deportation flight, backed by the “Jet2 Holiday” audio, a still from the movie E.T., encouraging immigrants to “go home.” “We won’t apologize for posting banger memes”, said an official White House spokesperson.

What does the White House care about – and does it care at all? I don’t see any evidence of compassion – certainly not for its own people, many of whom say they’re poorer under Trump’s second term. It makes me wonder if the president has become so detached from reality; so utterly desensitised to real, human pain and suffering and so desperately, psychotically in love with AI that he isn’t aware of what’s real and what isn’t, any more.

After all, he recently signed an executive order renaming AI “super intelligence” and says anyone who does not refer to it as such is “THE ENEMY”. He is largely resisting guardrails and safety regulations despite warnings of AI annihilating humanity within a decade; and has sparked a war of words with the actual Pope by calling him “WEAK” in all caps on social media and putting out doctored images of himself dressed up as Jesus.

No, it’s no surprise, really, that this particular Trump administration – Trump 2.0, entirely devoid of empathy – would take advantage of a tragic tiger attack, too. In 2026, we are all living in Donald Trump’s warped outrage factory. And it’s a world in which the death of man with mental illness is “fair game”; a family’s grief simply cannon fodder for clicks.

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