On day two of the shutdown the President posts an AI music video of the budget director as the Grim Reaper.

The video, posted Thursday evening to the President’s social platform, runs about ninety seconds. It is set to “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” the 1976 Blue Oyster Cult single. The director of the Office of Management and Budget appears, in AI-rendered form, as the figure of Death, robed and carrying a scythe. He is shown tipping a balance scale labeled “layoffs.” The President and the Vice President appear on stage in a band. A title card describes members of the opposing party as “babies.” The video was produced, per the watermark, by an outside meme outfit that calls itself the President’s online war machine.

Blue Oyster Cult issued a statement to multiple outlets the following morning. “We were not contacted about this in advance.” This is now the third documented instance, since August, of music being used in administration-affiliated content without permission of the artist. The Kenny Loggins case will arrive in two weeks.

The federal government has been closed for thirty-six hours. Roughly 900,000 workers are furloughed. The Office of Management and Budget is the agency that runs the mechanics of the shutdown. Its director’s job, on the second day, is to negotiate with Congress and to stand up the contingency plans. Instead, his official portrait this week is an AI rendering of himself as the personification of death, holding a sharpened agricultural tool, soundtracked to a song the band did not license.

A serious country, in the middle of its first government shutdown in seven years, would expect a different opening posture from its budget office.

The video remained up. Nine hundred thousand workers are still home.

Calmly documenting the decline.