
President Donald Trump’s Small Business Administration chief is taking lumps online after she posted a video that showed her walking like an “alien” down a hallway filled with photos of herself.
SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler filmed a TikTok video in which she answered questions while strolling past numerous photos of herself. She appeared to be holding an empty binder during her walk.
Commenters online latched onto the odd way she moved through the video, with an odd saunter, with one X user likening her walk to that of an alien disguised as a woman from the film Mars Attacks!
"Congratulations to Kelly Loeffler on her first day with limbs! You’ll get the hang of it!" X user Brian Tyler Cohen wrote in response to the video.
The mockery didn’t stop there. Other commenters were a bit more vicious and offered criticisms of the administrator’s body.
The video is strange, but the oddness is likely the result of the former Georgia senator's social media team botching a "walk-and-talk."
The technique is used often in film and television — it was especially prevalent in Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing — and gives a scene motion and a sense of progression or urgency while characters deliver expository dialogue.
Professional camera operators with gimbals and Stedicams who are trained to quickly walk backward while shooting a scene with actors walking naturally can pull the shots off. Interns with cellphones doing their best not to fall over is a different story.
It's clear in the video that Loeffler is walking slower than anyone would walk normally, likely because she was trying to stay in frame without overtaking the camera operator.
Unfortunately for Loeffler, the end result turned out weird, and the internet noticed.
“First day in a human body is always awkward,” on X user wrote.
“Why is there a giraffe wearing a Kelly Loeffler skin suit?,” another quipped.
“Seen less rigid movements in a 1970s action doll that had 5 decades of soda spilled on it and left in a hot car to bake than Kelly Loeffler,” a third added.
Another user wondered if the former Georgia senator couldn't pull off the walk because she is "secretly a nerd but by being conservative she’s forced into also trying to be a tradwife and bimbo simultaneously?"
A different user avoided attacking her strange walk and appearance and focused on the fact that Loeffler was still working for Trump even after his endorsement failed to secure her a victory in her 2021 re-election.
"The same self hating lady that had Trump hand her a big L in Georgia in 2021. No spine what-so-ever," they wrote.
Loeffler lost her re-election campaign in 2021 to Senator Raphael Warnock.
The SBA is just one of numerous federal agencies that are now using TikTok to promote their work. The agencies were banned from using the platform in 2022 amid worries that the Chinese government was using the app to spy on its users. TikTok divested in January when its Chinese owner, ByteDance, sold off a majority of its shares in the company to a group of U.S. investors that included Trump ally Larry Ellison's Oracle.
The White House reversed the TikTok ban on federal employees on Tuesday.
Last month, the Department of Justice adjusted its stance on the app. The DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel determined that the U.S. version of the app — the version created by the ByteDance divestment in January — was not subject to the 2022 ban.
After the July 21 policy change, several federal agencies launched their own accounts on the app. The Treasury Department, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Health and Human Services all started TikTok accounts following the July decision.