Trump deletes racist video depicting Obamas as apes after backlash
President Donald Trump is facing bipartisan backlash after posting a racist video that depicts former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes.
Trump removed the video from his Truth Social account Friday morning, about 12 hours after posting it.
While the video itself promoted false claims of election fraud, it ended by showing the Obamas’ heads attached to bodies of primates while “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays in the background.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office said the post was “disgusting behavior by the President.”
“Every single Republican must denounce this. Now,” Newsom’s office said.
Rep. Herb Conaway, D-N.J., called Trump “a vile racist old man” on X.
“The people in the @HouseGOP that don’t speak out on this, I’m going to assume you support this racism,” he said.
Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who ran against Trump in 2024 before dropping out and endorsing him, said he was “praying” the video is fake, “because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”
“The President should remove it,” Scott said.
The NAACP pointed out that Trump posted the video during Black History Month. It is a “stark reminder of how Trump and his followers truly view people. And we’ll remember that in November,” the organization wrote on X.
In an emailed statement to Straight Arrow News, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump’s post is 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.
A White House official later said a staffer erroneously made the post. The White House did not respond to a question from SAN as to whether that staffer will face disciplinary action.
Later, on Air Force One, Trump said he didn’t see the whole video, and instead, “just looked at the first part.” He then said he gave the video to “the people to generally, they look at the whole thing.”
He refused to apologize, maintaining that “I didn’t make a mistake.”
SAN reached out to the Obama Foundation for comment.
The Library Company of Philadelphia wrote that racist ideas about “biological difference and blackness” are not a new phenomenon. Historically, people would draw Black people in portraits as animals, to make them seem unintelligent and uncivilized.
Portrayals of Black people as monkeys were promoted by “slave traders, historians and practitioners, and practitioners of ‘scientific’ racism,” Brent Staples, a member of the New York Times’ editorial board, wrote in a 2018 article. They were used to justify slavery, lynching and the creation of the Jim Crow state, Staples said.
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
