Trump Removes Racist Video Depicting Obamas as Apes After Fierce Backlash

The US President Donald Trump deleted a video from his social media account that contained a racist image depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

The controversial clip, set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” was appended to a 62-second video promoting claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. This imagery, which evokes racist caricatures comparing Black people to monkeys, appears to be from an X (formerly Twitter) post by conservative meme creator Xerias from October. That original video also showed other high-profile Democrats, including Joe Biden (also as an ape eating a banana), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, and Hillary Clinton, as various animals.

Republican Allies Condemn the Post

The video immediately drew a strong rebuke, including from within Trump’s own party.

• Senator Tim Scott, a Black Republican from South Carolina and a Trump ally, was among the first to call for the removal, stating, “I was praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” He added, “The President should remove it.”
• Representative Mike Lawler (R-NY) called the post “wrong and incredibly offensive—whether intentional or a mistake” and demanded it “should be deleted immediately with an apology offered.”
• Even after the removal, Senator John Curtis (R-UT) posted that the video was “blatantly racist and inexcusable” and should not have been published for so long.

White House Response and Removal

Initially, the White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, defended the post in a statement to the BBC, describing it as an “internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King.” She urged critics to “stop the fake outrage.”

Following escalating criticism, the post was taken down from Trump’s Truth Social account. A White House official later attributed the posting to a staffer who had “erroneously” shared it and had “let the president down,” according to a source who spoke with Representative Byron Donalds (R-FL). The BBC has reached out to the White House for clarification on account access and the posting approval process.

Wider Criticism

The Obamas have not commented on the video. However, others were swift to condemn Trump’s action:

• Derrick Johnson, President of the NAACP, called the video “disgusting and utterly despicable,” accusing Trump of attempting to distract from the Epstein case and a “rapidly failing economy.”
• Ben Rhodes, former Deputy National Security Advisor in the Obama administration, stated that “future Americans will embrace the Obamas as beloved figures while studying him as a stain on our country.”
• Illinois Governor JB Pritzker simply posted, “Donald Trump is a racist.”
• The office of California Governor Gavin Newsom called it “Disgusting behaviour” and demanded that “Every single Republican must denounce this. Now.”
• House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called Trump a “vile, unhinged and malignant bottom feeder,” adding that “Every single Republican must immediately denounce Donald Trump’s disgusting bigotry.”

The minute-long video to which the racist clip was added also included claims about a voting conspiracy in Michigan during the 2020 election, claims that were previously debunked during Dominion Voting System’s successful civil actions against some media companies.

This incident is the latest in Trump’s long history of attacks on Barack Obama, which includes his years of promoting the false “birther” conspiracy that claimed the Hawaii-born Obama was ineligible to be president. Trump later conceded that Obama was born in the US.