President Donald Trump shared a post containing a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys, sparking outrage across the US political spectrum on Saturday, before deleting it in a rare backtrack and denying he had seen the relevant clip.
The White House initially dismissed what it called “fake outrage” over the video shared on Trump’s Truth Social account late Thursday night before later blaming the post on an error by a staff member.
Democrats condemned 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.
Near the end of the one-minute video promoting conspiracy theories about Republican Trump’s 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden, the Obamas were shown with their faces superimposed on the bodies of monkeys for about one second.
The video, uploaded late Thursday amid a flurry of other posts, repeated false claims that ballot-counting company Dominion Voting Systems helped steal the election from Trump.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt initially sought to downplay the controversy, 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.
About-face
But almost exactly 12 hours after the post appeared on Trump’s account, there was an unusual concession from an administration that typically refuses to acknowledge mistakes.
“A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down,” a White House official told AFP.
Speaking to reporters on board Air Force One late Friday, Trump defended the thrust of the video’s claims about election fraud but said he had not seen the offensive clip.
“I just looked at the first part… and I didn’t see the whole thing,” Trump said, adding that he had passed it to staffers to post and they also had not watched the full video. Asked whether he condemned the racist imagery, Trump replied: “Of course I do.”
There was no immediate comment from the Obamas.
Former vice-president Kamala Harris, who has long criticised Trump’s divisive racial rhetoric, called out the White House’s backtracking in a post on X on Friday.
“No one believes this cover-up from the White House, especially since they originally defended this post,” she wrote. “We are all clear-eyed about who Donald Trump is and what he believes.”
Disgusting bigotry
While Democrats seized on the post, outrage from some members of Trump’s own Republican Party appeared to trigger the reversal.
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 urged Trump to remove it.
Another Republican senator, Roger Wicker, said the post was “totally unacceptable. The president should take it down and apologise”.
The top Democrat in the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, described Trump as “vile, unhinged and malignant” and urged Republicans on X to “immediately denounce Donald Trump’s disgusting bigotry”.
Trump launched his political career by promoting the racist and false “birther” conspiracy theory claiming Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
He has long had a bitter rivalry with his Democratic predecessor, resenting in particular Obama’s popularity and his Nobel Peace Prize.
In his second term in the White House, Trump has increasingly used hyper-realistic but fabricated AI visuals on Truth Social and other platforms, often glorifying himself and mobilising his conservative base around social issues.
During negotiations to avert a US government shutdown, Trump posted a video of Jeffries — who is Black — wearing a fake moustache and a sombrero. Jeffries described the image as racist.
One AI-generated video showed fighter jets dumping human waste on protesters and was created by the same X user who produced the video depicting the Obamas as monkeys.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has led a campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes.
US federal anti-discrimination policies emerged from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, led largely by Black Americans in the struggle for equality and justice after centuries of slavery.
Slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, but other forms of institutional racism persisted for decades thereafter.
