The White House has deleted a Truth Social repost by President Donald Trump after intense backlash over a racist video portraying the Obamas as apes. Trump used his social media account late Thursday to share a video promoting election conspiracy theories that includes a racist depiction of former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as primates in a jungle.
The post quickly drew backlash for its treatment of the nation’s first Black president and first lady. It was part of a burst of activity on Trump’s Truth Social account amplifying his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, assertions repeatedly rejected by courts across the country and by his own attorney general during his first term, news agency Associated Press reported.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt rejected criticism of the post. An Obama spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
The 62-second clip, one of dozens of posts Trump shared overnight, largely consists of footage from a conservative video alleging deliberate tampering with voting machines in battleground states during the 2020 count. Near the end of the clip, a brief scene shows two primates with the smiling faces of the Obamas superimposed on them.
Brief clip shows Obamas as primates
Those frames appear to be taken from a longer video previously circulated by an influential conservative meme maker. The video portrays Trump as “King of the Jungle” and depicts a range of Democratic leaders as animals, including President Joe Biden, who is white, shown as a primate eating a banana.
“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King,” Leavitt said in a text message, referring to Disney’s 1994 animated film. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.” Trump did not comment on the video in his post.
Republicans Against Trump condemns post
The group Republicans Against Trump, a frequent social media critic of the president, condemned the post, calling it a “racist image.” “There’s no bottom,” the group wrote.
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Trump and official White House social media accounts have frequently reposted memes and artificial intelligence-generated videos. As on Friday, Trump aides typically dismiss criticism and frame the content as humorous.
BREAKING: Trump just posted a video on Truth Social that includes a racist image of Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys.
The post also fits a long pattern of Trump’s intensely personal attacks on the Obamas and his use of incendiary — and at times racist — rhetoric. During the 2024 campaign, Trump said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” language similar to that used by Adolf Hitler to dehumanise Jews in Nazi Germany.
During his first term, Trump referred to a group of developing nations with majority Black populations as “shithole countries.” He initially denied using the slur but acknowledged in December 2025 that he did.
While Obama was in office, Trump promoted false claims that the former president, who was born in Hawaii, had been born in Kenya and was therefore constitutionally ineligible to serve. Trump repeatedly demanded that Obama release his birth records to prove he was a “natural-born citizen.”
Obama later released his Hawaii birth certificate. Trump ultimately acknowledged during the 2016 campaign, after securing the Republican nomination, that Obama was born in Hawaii, but then falsely claimed that his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton had started the so-called birther attacks.
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