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The White House found itself in the midst of a controversy after facing significant backlash, including criticism from GOP Senator Tim Scott, the Senate’s only Black Republican. Scott condemned the post as racist and urged former President Trump to delete it.
Initially, the White House attempted to justify the post, dismissing the criticism as “fake outrage.” However, the narrative shifted later in the morning when an official informed CNN that the post was mistakenly shared by a White House staff member and had subsequently been removed.
By the time the error was acknowledged and the post taken down, it had already been publicly viewable for nearly 12 hours.
Amid the unfolding situation, a Republican Senate official revealed that members of the GOP had reached out to Trump to address their concerns about the controversial post.
A GOP Senate official said Republicans had called Trump to discuss the post with him.
And it sent the White House into major damage-control mode, sources said, with officials, advisers and allies reaching out to politicians and the media to dispute that Trump himself played any role.
One White House advisor asserted “the president was not aware of that video, and was very let down by the staffer who put it out”.
Another ally sought to place blame on a specific aide.
The Obamas briefly and suddenly appear near the end of the short video, which promotes false claims that voting machines helped steal the 2020 election, with their faces superimposed onto the bodies of apes.
As the images appear, for about one second, the start of the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight plays in the background.
CNN has reached out to the Obamas for comment.
The post, which recalls the racist trope of comparing black people to monkeys, prompted swift backlash, including from several Republicans who have had close relationships with the White House.
“The President’s post is wrong and incredibly offensive — whether intentional or a mistake — and should be deleted immediately with an apology offered,” Lawler wrote on X.
Another New York Republican facing a tough r-election battle, Nick LaLota, also urged Trump to delete the post.
And in the minutes before its removal, two close White House allies in the Senate — Pete Ricketts of Nebraska and Roger Wicker of Mississippi — went public with their own calls for Trump to apologise, in a sign that criticism within the party was beginning to snowball.
“This is totally unacceptable,” Wicker, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote on X. “The president should take it down and apologise.”
Neither Trump nor the White House has apologised.
And despite outrage from some GOP lawmakers, the top two Senate Republican leaders, John Thune and John Barrasso, are not commenting on the controversy.
Aides to the senators said they would notify CNN if they decide to respond.
But the post’s deletion marked an abrupt shift from just hours earlier, when White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed the initial outcry.
“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 statement.
“Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
The clip of the Obamas, which was spliced into the end of a longer video promoting unfounded election conspiracies, appeared to come from a video shared last October by an X user and captioned “President Trump: King of the Jungle.”
That original video depicted several prominent Democrats as various animals, as well as showing the Obamas as apes.
The X user who posted that video appeared to be the same one who first posted a video that Trump had shared in October, showing the president wearing a crown and flying a fighter jet dumping what appears to be waste on protesters at a “No Kings” rally.
The incident is the latest example of Trump drawing criticism for sharing racist content on his social media platform.
Last year, the president posted an apparent AI video depicting Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office.
Later last year, Trump and members of his administration also shared digitally altered images and videos of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wearing a fake moustache and a sombrero, imagery Jeffries publicly described as racist.
Trump also has a long history of posting and reposting conspiracy theories and other false claims.
But it is very unusual for Trump to take down a social media post — and even more rare to issue an apology or take responsibility for posts insulting large swaths of people.
As he was campaigning for president in October 2015, Trump retweeted a post questioning the mental fitness of Iowans.
That post was removed a few hours later, and Trump pinned blame on a “young intern” in a statement: “The young intern who accidentally did a Retweet apologises.”
He went on to lose the Iowa caucuses.
But Trump has also offered some insight into his social media philosophy, telling CNN in August of that year, “You know, I retweet – I retweet for a reason.”