Fury erupted early on Friday after Donald Trump posted a racist video that depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
The clip appeared during one of the 79-year-old US president’s increasingly frequent late-night posting sprees to his Truth Social account, and shows the laughing faces of the former president and first lady superimposed on the bodies of primates in a jungle setting, bobbing to the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
The appear briefly at the end of a minute-long video made by a third party that amplifies Trump’s persistent but false claim that he won the 2020 election, when in fact he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. The conspiracy-theory video is a repost of content stamped with the logo of the website Patriot News Outlet, a site supportive of the Trump, a Republican.
By 8.30am ET Friday, the post had attracted about 4,000 likes but also garnered outrage from both sides of the aisle for the inclusion of such a blatant racist trope about the US’s first Black president and his wife, both Democrats.
The press office of the Democratic California governor, Gavin Newsom, was among the first to condemn the post on X.
“Disgusting behavior by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this. Now,” it said.
Podcaster Ben Rhodes, the former deputy national security adviser during the Obama administration, also accused Trump of racism.
“Let it haunt Trump and his racist followers that future Americans will embrace the Obamas as beloved figures while studying him as a stain on our history,” he wrote.
Rhodes included another post, from the group Republicans Against Trump, which was posted just about half an hour after Trump posted around midnight. It featured a image of the frame at the end of the video with the Obamas and the comment: “BREAKING: Trump just posted a video on Truth Social that includes a racist image of Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys. There’s no bottom.”
Republicans Against Trump has more than a million followers on X and is an alliance of party members disillusioned with the Trump administration and its direction. The account often posts or reposts material critical of the president from third parties.
Meanwhile, the veteran Democratic political strategist Adam Parkhomenko alluded to a 2024 allegation that Trump used a racial slur while he was host of the TV show The Apprentice.
“This is overt racism. Full stop,” Parkhomenko said in an X post.
“There’s no ‘misinterpretation’ and no excuse. This is who he is, who he’s always been, and why he should never be anywhere near power again. And there’s a reason the tapes from The Apprentice have never been released,” he said.
In a statement sent to the Guardian, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, attempted to brush off the outrage. She linked to a post on X last October by a separate rightwing account, which features a 55-second video from which the Obama clip appears to have been taken. It begins with the Obamas depicted as apes, later shows Biden’s head superimposed on a monkey body and other prominent Democrats depicted as other animals, while Trump is shown as a male lion.
“This 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.
Friday’s post that ends with the unexplained Obama flash clip mostly focuses on the false and disproven claims that ballot-counting company Dominion Voting Systems helped steal the 2020 presidential election from Trump with doctored vote-counting machines.
The company accepted a settlement of $787.5m from Fox News in April 2023 in a landmark defamation lawsuit.
