US President Donald Trump triggered global outrage on Friday after he posted a video depicting Barack Obama, the first Black president in American history, and his wife Michelle as monkeys.
Top Democrats condemned the post as “racist,” even as the White House rejected what it called “fake outrage” and said the video posted late Thursday on Trump’s Truth Social account was from an “internet meme.”
Near the end of the one-minute-long video promoting conspiracies about Republican Trump’s 2020 election loss, the Obamas are shown with their faces on the bodies of monkeys for about one second.
The song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays in the background when the Obamas appear.
The video repeats false allegations that ballot-counting company Dominion Voting Systems helped steal the 2020 election from Trump and hand victory to Joe Biden, who was Obama’s vice president at the time.
“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to AFP.
“Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public,” added Leavitt.
As of early Friday morning, the video had been liked several thousand times on the president’s social media platform.
The office of California Governor Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate and a prominent Trump critic, slammed the post.
“Disgusting behaviour by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this. Now,” Newsom’s press office account posted on X.
Ben Rhodes, a former top national security advisor and close confidant to Barack Obama, also condemned the imagery.
“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 on X.
Obama is the only Black president in American history and backed Trump’s opponent Kamala Harris on the campaign trail in the 2024 presidential election.
Billionaire Trump launched his own political career by pushing the racist and false “birther” conspiracy theory that his Democratic predecessor was lying about being born in the United States.
Trump has long had a bitter rivalry with Obama, who was president from 2009 to 2017, taking particular umbrage at the Democrat’s popularity and the fact that he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
In the first year of his second term in the White House, Trump has ramped up his use of hyper-realistic but fabricated AI visuals on Truth Social and other platforms, often glorifying himself while lampooning his critics.
He has used the provocative posts to rally his conservative base.
Last year, Trump posted a video generated by artificial intelligence showing Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office and appearing behind bars in an orange jumpsuit.
Later, he posted an AI clip of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — who is Black — wearing a fake moustache and a sombrero.
Jeffries called the image racist.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has drawn criticism from his opponents for leading a crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.
One of Trump’s first acts was to terminate all federal government DEI programs, including related policies in the military.
The drive to rid the armed forces of what Trump has derided as “woke” initiatives has also seen the removal from some military academy bookshelves of scores of books that cover the US history of racial discrimination.
US federal anti-discrimination programs were born of the 1960s civil rights struggle, mainly led by Black Americans, for equality and justice after hundreds of years of slavery, whose abolition in 1865 saw other institutional forms of racism enforced.