Trump posts, then deletes, video that includes racist depiction of Obamas as apes
White House initially rejects ‘fake outrage’ over video on US president’s Truth Social account, before blaming an unnamed staff member
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US President Donald Trump shared a post about election conspiracy theories that included a racist depiction of former president Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, as apes in a jungle, sparking outrage across the political spectrum Friday, before deleting it in a rare backtrack.
The White House initially rejected “fake outrage” over the video shared on Trump’s Truth Social account late Thursday night, only to then blame the post on an error by a staff member.
Trump said later Friday that he had only “looked at the beginning [of the post], and that “nobody knew” it included the brief depiction of the Obamas that prompted the furor.
Democrats had slammed Trump as “vile” over the post about the Obamas — the first Black president and first lady in US history — while a senior Republican senator said the video was blatantly racist.
Nearly all of the 62-second clip, which was among dozens of Truth Social posts from Trump overnight, appears to be from a conservative video alleging deliberate tampering with voting machines in battleground states as the 2020 presidential votes were tallied.
At the 60-second mark, however, is a quick, spliced-in scene of two primates, with the Obamas’ smiling faces imposed on them.
It is absolutely positively real. Donald Trump posted this video that depicts the Obamas as apes. It’s 59 seconds into the video.
I just screen grabbed it for the people who are saying it isn’t true.
Was it snuck in there? If so it needs the apology of all time. pic.twitter.com/0ALSFH1Il0
— Jennifer ????????????♀️????????⬛ ???? (@babybeginner) February 6, 2026
The song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays in the background when the Obamas appear.
The video, uploaded amid a flurry of other posts, repeated false allegations that ballot-counting company Dominion Voting Systems helped steal the election from Trump.
At first, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt played down the row, saying the images were “from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King.”
“Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public,” Leavitt said in a statement to AFP.
The video Leavitt referenced was previously circulated by an influential conservative meme maker. It shows Trump as “King of the Jungle” and depicts a range of Democratic leaders as animals, including Joe Biden, who is white, as a primate eating a banana.
But almost exactly 12 hours after the post appeared on Trump’s account, there was an unusual concession from an administration that normally refuses to admit the slightest mistake.
“A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down,” a White House official told AFP.
Later Friday, speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump said he was not going to apologize about the post and that “I didn’t make a mistake.”
He said he had only “looked at the beginning [of the post], it was fine… Nobody knew that [it included the brief clip of the Obamas].” Had the people in his team who handled the post seen that clip, he said, they probably “would have had the sense to take it down.”
There was no immediate comment from the Obamas.
While Democrats had pounced on the post, it was the outrage from some members of Trump’s own Republican party that appeared to trigger the about-face.
Tim Scott, the only Black Republican senator and a contender for the 2024 presidential nomination, called the video “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”
Scott said he was “praying it was fake” and called for Trump to remove it.
Roger Wicker, another Republican senator, said the post was “totally unacceptable. The president should take it down and apologize.”
‘Disgusting bigotry’
The top Democrat in the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, called Trump “vile, unhinged and malignant” and urged Republicans on X to “immediately denounce Donald Trump’s disgusting bigotry.”
During negotiations to avoid a US government shutdown last year, Trump posted a video of Jeffries, who is Black, wearing a fake mustache and a sombrero. Jeffries called the image racist.
Trump launched his own political career by pushing the racist and false “birther” conspiracy theory that Obama was lying about being born in the United States.
Trump has long had a bitter rivalry with his Democratic predecessor, taking particular umbrage at his popularity and the fact that he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
In the first year of his second term in the White House, Trump has ramped up his use of hyper-realistic but fabricated AI visuals on Truth Social and other platforms, often glorifying himself while lampooning his critics.
He has used the provocative posts to rally his conservative base.
An AI-generated video in one of the posts, showing fighter jets dumping human waste on protesters, was created by the same X user who made the video showing the Obamas as monkeys.
Last year, Trump posted a video generated by artificial intelligence showing Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office and appearing behind bars in an orange jumpsuit.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has drawn criticism from his opponents for leading a crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.
US federal anti-discrimination programs were born of the 1960s civil rights struggle, mainly led by Black Americans, for equality and justice after hundreds of years of slavery, whose abolition in 1865 saw other institutional forms of racism enforced.
The Times of Israel Community.