A post from U.S. President Donald Trump’s Truth Social account in which Barack and Michelle Obama are superimposed atop the bodies of apes was taken down after an outcry on Friday.
The Trump account reposted from another user a video — which repeated a laundry list of debunked claims concerning the 2020 election, which Trump lost — containing a few brief seconds of the former president and his wife, smiling on the animal bodies. The 1960s hit The Lion Sleeps Tonight, with its lyrics of the “mighty jungle,” plays in the background.
Ben Rhodes, who worked in communications in the Obama White House, said: “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.”
Glenn Ivey, House Rep. from Maryland and a Democrat, called on Republicans to “denounce this behaviour clearly and publicly. Silence is complicity.”
At least one did. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said on social media that “it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it.”
The frames depicting the Obamas were taken from a longer video, previously circulated by an influential conservative meme maker. It shows Trump as “King of the Jungle” and depicts a range of Democratic leaders as animals, including Joe Biden, who is white, as a primate eating a banana.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, in comments to The Associated Press, said: “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
“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 by text.
According to past reports, Trump is believed to author or repost the majority of material on his Truth Social account, though aides have also done so.
Two hours after Leavitt’s comments, a White House official told media outlets that the post had been taken down. An unnamed staffer was responsible for an “erroneous” post, according to the administration, but it was not clear if any disciplinary action would be taken.
A number of inflammatory overnight posts remained, including a repost in which the Democratic Party is described as being “anti-Christ, anti-Family, anti-Black and anti-life.”
From the beginning of his political career, Trump has claimed ignorance about content when his account has reposted controversial messages.
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False Obama claims
After Trump joined Twitter in 2009, he frequently weighed in on political issues, helping to reignite and popularize a fringe theory that Obama had not been born in Hawaii, but rather, in Africa.
Even after publicly stating that he believed Obama was America-born, Trump continued to play footsy with the idea, pointing to the “many people” who believed the 44th president’s Hawaii birth certificate was not authentic.
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He also falsely accused Obama of spying on his 2016 political campaign and helping to spearhead the investigation into contacts between his campaign and Russian officials. No credible evidence has emerged stemming from numerous reports and investigations that Obama when president had any influence over the decisions of the Justice Department and FBI.
The Obamas have occasionally pushed back on Trump’s claims or criticized the two-time Republican president, including late last month after two fatal shootings of U.S. citizens in Minneapolis committed by federal immigration officers.
“Rather than trying to impose some semblance of discipline and accountability over the agents they’ve deployed, the president and current administration officials seem eager to escalate the situation,” the Obamas wrote in part.
Michelle Obama did not attend Trump’s inauguration or Jimmy Carter’s funeral, both in January 2025, although she has not publicly cited Trump as the reason for her absence.
While Trump in his political career has lashed out at perceived rivals regardless of their race or background, he has also engaged in racist tropes — as with comments made last year about Haitian immigrants in the U.S. — or using inflammatory, anti-Black language.
President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, greet president-elect Donald Trump and Melania Trump at the White House on Jan. 20, 2017. Within weeks, Trump began launching a series of unproven allegations toward his predecessor. (Evan Vucci/The Associated Press)
Last year on the campaign trail, Trump acted confused by the biracial identity of Democratic opponent Kamala Harris, whose parents were born in Jamaica and India.
“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black,” he said at an event organized by the National Association of Black Journalists. “She was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden she made a turn.”
More recently, as his administration has sought to score political points about a welfare scandal in Minnesota, he has used derogatory language to refer to Somali-American residents of that state, as well as to describe House Rep. Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia and represents a Minneapolis district.
After mid-air collision above Washington, D.C., killed 67 people in his first days back in the White House, Trump railed baselessly about diversity hiring in the ranks of the nation’s commercial air traffic controllers.
Recent reports and hearings have suggested a host of factors likely contributed to the crash, including helicopter pilot inexperience and a poorly designed nighttime exercise.
Administration actions under scrutiny
The second Trump administration has also featured executive orders and actions that have raised concerns among educators and historians about intent.
The government has fired diversity officers across a range of departments, curtailed some agencies’ celebrations of Black History Month and dismantled Black history at federal sites, most recently removing an exhibit on slavery in Philadelphia last month, leading to a battle with city officials.
A person on Jan. 23 photographs messages that have been left after explanatory panels part of an exhibit on slavery at President’s House Site in Philadelphia were removed. (Matt Rourke/The Associated Press)
The Defence Department, at one point, temporarily removed training videos recognizing the Black Tuskegee Airmen and an online biography of Jackie Robinson, and ordered the renaming of a series of ships named after civil rights and human rights icons who were mostly, though not all, persons of colour.
The Trump administration has referred to “revisionism” and criticized depictions of history that it says portray the U.S. as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”
Bennie Thompson, the influential Black Congress member from Mississippi, has accused the administration of pushing policies “that try to erase Black voices and history.”
With respect to the 2020 election, Trump continues to insist that his loss to Joe Biden was a “rigged” vote, but has never explained how the presidential contest alone was corrupted on a day where hundreds of other federal, state and county elections took place without major incident. A typical voter on Nov. 5, 2020, was confronted with a ballot with several contests on it.
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Images provided by The Canadian Press, Reuters and Getty Images
Both Trump’s former attorney general William Barr and the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in his first administration rejected his claims of widespread fraud that could change the ultimate outcome, and recounts, reviews and audits in the battleground states of 2020 all affirmed Biden’s victory.
But recent Trump comments about federalizing elections, and an FBI raid ostensibly related to the 2020 vote, have renewed fears among Democrats that his administration will again stir up confusion and chaos in this year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential election.