WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump posted a blatantly racist video clip portraying former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes, then deleted it after an unusually strong and public outcry from members of his own party.
The clip, set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” was spliced near the end of a 62-second video that promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and was posted by Trump late Thursday. It was the latest in a pattern by Trump of promoting offensive imagery and slurs about Black Americans and others.
The decision to delete the link from his Truth Social account was a remarkable retreat by Trump, whose own press secretary just hours earlier had brushed off criticism of the video and made no attempt to distance the president from it.
“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the king of the jungle and Democrats as characters from ‘The Lion King’,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, before the clip was deleted. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
The president regularly uses Truth Social to communicate his views; he and a handful of trusted aides have access to his account. His feed is a patchwork of policy, political bluster and, increasingly, artificial intelligence memes and deepfakes.
The clip was in line with Trump’s history of making degrading remarks about people of color, women and immigrants, and he has for years taken aim at the Obamas in particular. Across Trump’s administration, racist images and slogans have become common on government websites and accounts, with the White House, Labor Department and Homeland Security Department all having promoted posts that echo white supremacist messaging.
The White House usually responds to criticism about such things by doubling down, laughing it off or suggesting that critics cannot take a joke.
Last month, when the administration admitted to doctoring a photo of Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Minnesota protester, to make the Black civil rights attorney look disheveled and distressed, a spokesperson said it was nothing more than a “meme” and that “the memes will continue.”
In October, when Trump posted an artificial intelligence-generated video depicting Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, with a fake mustache and a sombrero — an image that Jeffries called racist and bigoted — Vice President JD Vance said that he thought it was “funny” and that the administration was “having a good time.”
Trump has also referred to Somalis as “garbage,” equated diversity with incompetence and inferiority, and cast himself as the protector of white people at home and abroad.
But the latest video struck a nerve that the White House did not appear to anticipate. The depiction of the Obamas as apes perpetuates a racist trope, historically used by slave traders and segregationists to dehumanize Black people and justify lynchings.
A clear voice of disapproval of the post emerged from Republicans on Capitol Hill, who are usually reluctant to call out the president and rarely do so in the forceful tones seen Friday.
Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Senate’s only Black Republican and a close ally of Trump, wrote on social platform X that he hoped the post was fake “because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”
“The President should remove it,” he said
Scott is the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the party’s campaign arm in charge of holding the Senate, a key role leading up to the midterm elections in November.
Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., said that the president’s post “is wrong and incredibly offensive.” Rep. Michael R. Turner, R-Ohio, said the “racist images” of the Obamas were “offensive, heart breaking, and unacceptable.”
Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said the president “should take it down and apologize.”
Even after Trump deleted the video, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., insisted that the president apologize for sharing it in the first place.
As the criticism grew, Trump allies sought to deflect blame from the president and vouch for his character. One person briefed on internal White House conversations but who declined to be identified said the post was the fault of a junior staffer. A pastor with ties to Trump claimed he had spoken directly to the president Friday and that Trump said he had not posted the video and knew the imagery in it was “wrong, offensive and unacceptable.”
But Trump himself said nothing about it publicly or on his social media feed. And the White House press office did not respond to questions from The New York Times. Those questions included why the White House defended the post at first; whether Trump believed it was racist and offensive; and whether anybody would be fired over it.
Doug Heye, a GOP strategist, said the response from Republicans was unusual. The White House, he said, “realized what a colossal screw-up this was, and they realized that because elected Republicans were directly pushing back on them for one of the rare times we’ve ever seen.”
A spokesperson for the Obamas declined to comment on the video.
Trump’s attacks on Barack Obama go back years. As far back as 2011, Trump amplified the false “birther” conspiracy theory that Obama was not born in the United States and questioned the legitimacy of his presidency. Last year, Trump shared an AI-generated video of Obama being arrested in the Oval Office and later in prison.
The Obamas have rarely responded to Trump’s attacks over the years, but Michelle Obama, in a speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention spoke candidly about being the target of racism by Trump.
“For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us,” Obama said. “See, his limited and narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hardworking, highly educated, successful people who happened to be Black.
“It’s his same old con,” she added, “doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people’s lives better.”
Trump and the White House have long circulated fake and AI-generated content to mock his political foes, but in his second term, the racist undertones have become more overt.
Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, said that the video was “just hard-boiled racism using the oldest trope against Black people imaginable.”
Trump’s use of AI-generated content has brought once-fringe content into the mainstream. Hundreds of users, posting anonymously each day, have produced thousands of AI-powered videos and images displaying their fondness for the Trump administration and mocking the president’s enemies. Their work is often crude and sometimes racist.
Trump has become a prolific re-poster of such content. He often shares posts himself in late-night flurries, like the string of posts he made Thursday night.
At other times, he dictates posts to one of his aides or has an aide share a post that has been prepared for him, including updates on international relations and political endorsements.
And many of his posts are conspiratorial or cruel mockery of his opponents.
The video Trump reposted Thursday starts off as a look at conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. It originally aired during a 2021 event hosted by Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and one of the most prolific spreaders of 2020 election misinformation.
Narrating is Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who was subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee for efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
At the end, spliced in, is the clip portraying the Obamas, which appeared to have been taken from a video that was shared in October by a user on X with the caption “President Trump: King of the Jungle” and an emoji of a lion.
In that video, several high-profile Democrats — including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris — were shown as various animals, while Trump was depicted as a lion. The video ended with the animals bowing down to Trump. (The president shared only the part of the video where the Obamas are shown as apes.)
Quentin James, a co-founder of the Collective PAC, which aims to elect Black officials in America, likened the video to a “digital minstrel show.”
“The fact that a sitting president is now using AI to circulate the same dehumanizing imagery that appeared in 19th-century propaganda should alarm every American, regardless of party,” James said. “This is the through line from minstrelsy to Truth Social, and the intent is identical: to strip Black people of their humanity for political entertainment.”
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