Violent slapstick videos that glamorize dictators and dunk on Trump have exploded in popularity on YouTube this year, becoming some of the most watched political content in 2025.
One of the single most watched political videos on YouTube right now involves an AI-generated Vladimir Putin and Ali Khamenei setting a pack of pseudo-cartoon bears on Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu after Trump and Netanyahu push Khamenei out of a plane. It has more than 20 million views, nearly 150,000 likes, and variously hosts programmatic ads for ketamine, “stuck poop” solutions and “the world’s first mass produced exoskeleton.”
The video is one of thousands published by a cluster of YouTube accounts posting short, Tom-and-Jerry-esque AI-generated skits depicting world leaders in humiliatingly ludicrous scenarios. The reach of the videos is astonishing: Since they began appearing earlier this year, they have amassed more than 2.2 billion views. (For context, the official White House YouTube account has accrued 88 million views since it was established in 2006; Comedy Central’s The Daily Show has 4.4 billion total views over the nine years it’s been active.)
In many of the skits, Putin, Khamenei and Kim Jong Un are portrayed as tricksters that prank, imprison or kill Trump and Netanyahu. Putin repeatedly dates Melania Trump, the men often pour oil on one another and the three dictators trap Trump in various pits in the ground. Other recurring themes include wild animal attacks, leaders taking axes and saws to oil pipes and vehicles made of fruit. A few highlights: Volodimir Zelensky planting explosives in Trump’s toilet (with inevitable results), JD Vance dressed as a maid serving Trump McDonalds as Putin, Kim, and Khamenei burn an American flag and Putin shooting an arrow at an eagle-bodied Netanyahu while riding a bear to save Khamenei from the eagle’s grasp (Putin and Khamenei then eat the eagle).
Set to Alvin-and-the-Chipmunks style laugh tracks, the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme song and other comedic fare, the videos’ style is something between The Three Stooges and The Itchy and Scratchy Show, even when they result in leaders’ assassination. The accounts publishing the videos say that they are “just for fun” and “not here to offend anyone.” Forbes was not able to reach the account creators for comment.
Mostly missing from the action is Chinese autocrat Xi Jinping, who appears only in a few videos, like one where Trump shines his shoes, and another where he laughs uncontrollably while reading Trump’s Art Of The Deal.
According to the platform analytics company, Zelf, eight of the ten most viewed YouTube videos about Trump in 2025 came from this set of accounts. The largest of them, called Make AI Great Again, first went viral back in April for posting videos depicting U.S. officials as sweatshop workers in response to Trump’s announcement of aggressive tariffs against China. The sweatshop videos had earlier circulated on Chinese social media platforms, and were amplified by Chinese and Russian state media. The Make AI Great Again account brags that it has been “officially recognized by the White House.” As evidence, it provides a link to a video from April in which White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt was asked about the sweatshop videos. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Since then, the accounts have continued to dominate discourse on YouTube, where their videos have also mocked Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, French President Emanuel Macron and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, among others. The account Global Presidents, whose videos have amassed more than 660 million views since it was created in June, has also produced a set of videos featuring the Russia-backed autocrat Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso, who committed a coup d’etat to take power in the country back in 2022 and has since turned its alliances away from Europe and toward Russia and China.
Bret Schafer, a senior fellow studying media and digital disinformation at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, said the choice of Traoré as a subject — along with Xi’s general absence — might mean the videos’ creators had geopolitical, rather than just financial, motivations. Traoré doesn’t have high name recognition in YouTube’s largest markets, so he wouldn’t be a natural choice to attract likes or views. But both China and Russia have invested heavily in propaganda efforts across West Africa in recent years.
Schafer noted that the Global Presidents account also posted videos featuring Beijing’s military parade and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro praising Chinese cell phones, which were both popular topics in Chinese state media.
Some accounts seemed to have different motivations than others: The Make AI Great Again account, Schafer noted, featured Chinese government talking points, where an account called Hatim’s Shorts featured Balkan dances and Armenia-Azerbaijan negotiations. Schafer said that the accounts did seem foreign — they “did not read as something done by an American” — and noted that the people behind them might be both politically and financially motivated. “The tangling of motives would not be unusual,” he said.
The videos do not violate YouTube’s policies, because they are clearly identified by their creators as AI-generated fiction. YouTube regularly removes coordinated influence operations backed by the Chinese and Russian governments, but spokesperson Jack Malon said the company had found no evidence of coordinated activity in this case. He said the company did remove one account —a page called Cage Carnage that amassed 119 million views — because it was run by a person who had run a previously suspended YouTube account.
Many of the videos shared by the YouTube accounts have also spread across other platforms. On TikTok, accounts mirroring the “Make AI Great Again” and “Global Presidents” YouTube accounts have amassed nearly 150 million views. Parallel accounts on Instagram Reels have also shared much of the same content. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment. Meta declined to comment.
YouTube didn’t answer questions about how much money the “world leader” videos had made, either for the company or for the videos’ creators. It also didn’t answer questions about why the platform had pushed the videos to so many people.
The scale of the trend took Schafer, the disinformation expert, by surprise: “I was blown away by the number of views.”
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