Edited videos of the House speaker were widely shared online, pointing to the political chaos that digital manipulation is likely to cause in the future.
Manipulated videos of Speaker Nancy Pelosi that made it seem as if she were repeatedly stumbling and slurring her words spread across social media on Thursday, as tensions escalated between President Trump and the Democratic leader.
One of the videos, which showed Ms. Pelosi speaking at a conference this week, was slowed down to make her speech appear continually garbled. The video has been viewed millions of times on Facebook and was amplified by the president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who shared the video Thursday night on Twitter. “What is wrong with Nancy Pelosi?” Mr. Giuliani said in a tweet that has since been deleted. “Her speech pattern is bizarre.”
Mr. Trump tweeted a separate video of Ms. Pelosi, from Fox Business, which spliced together moments from a 20-minute news conference to emphasize points where she had stumbled on her words. “PELOSI STAMMERS THROUGH NEWS CONFERENCE,” the president tweeted.
The edited videos surfaced online amid a particularly intense and public feud between the two leaders. Each questioned the other’s temperament and mental fitness in an exchange of personal insults on Thursday, as Ms. Pelosi works to stave off impeachment proceedings that she believes could harm her party and as Mr. Trump continues to defy Democratic efforts to subpoena documents and summon witnesses in the wake of the release of the special counsel’s report last month.
But the videos also raised broader concerns about the roles of digital manipulation, misleading videos and misinformation in politics going forward, particularly in the lead-up to the 2020 election.
Mr. Trump has previously used doctored, if obviously cartoonish, videos for political purposes, including ones targeting former Vice President Joseph R.
