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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has stirred controversy by sharing a video on his social media platform that promotes election conspiracy theories and includes offensive imagery of former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama portrayed as primates in a jungle setting.
The post, made on Thursday night, quickly sparked criticism across party lines due to its depiction of the nation’s first Black president and first lady, both Democrats. This comes amid a series of social media posts from Trump reiterating his unfounded claims that the 2020 election was fraudulently taken from him. These assertions continue despite numerous court rulings and statements from his own former Attorney General, all confirming there was no significant fraud that could have altered the election’s outcome.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed the backlash over the video targeting the Obamas. A spokesperson for Barack Obama stated that the former president has chosen not to comment on the matter.
The controversial content appeared in a 62-second video, one of many posts by Trump on Truth Social that night, which largely borrowed from a conservative video accusing deliberate manipulation of voting machines in key battleground states during the 2020 election. Near the end of the video, a brief segment shows two primates with superimposed faces of the Obamas.
These images were originally part of a longer video previously circulated by a prominent conservative meme creator. The video portrays Trump as the “King of the Jungle” and characterizes various Democratic leaders as animals, including President Joe Biden, who is depicted 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 by text, referring to Disney’s 1994 feature 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, which comes in the first week of Black History Month and days after a presidential proclamation that cited “the contributions of black Americans to our national greatness and their enduring commitment to the American principles of liberty, justice, and equality.”
Republican Sen. Tim Scott, who is Black, was among those who criticized Trump’s post.
“Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it,” Scott, who chairs Senate Republicans’ midterm campaign arm, said on social media.
NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement, “Donald Trump’s video is blatantly racist, disgusting, and utterly despicable.”
Johnson asserted that Trump is trying anything to distract from economic conditions and attention on the Jeffrey Epstein case files.
“You know who isn’t in the Epstein files? Barack Obama,” Johnson said. “You know who actually improved the economy as president? Barack Obama.”
The group Republicans Against Trump, a frequent social media critic of the president, wrote: “There’s no bottom.”
Trump and the official White House social media accounts frequently repost memes and artificial intelligence-generated videos. As Leavitt did Friday, Trump aides typically dismiss critiques and cast the images as humorous.
There is a long history in the U.S. of powerful white figures associating Black people with animals, including apes, in demonstrably false and racist ways. The practice dates back to 18th century cultural racism and pseudo-scientific theories in which white people drew connections between Africans and monkeys to justify the enslavement of Black people in Europe and North America, and later to dehumanize freed Black people as an uncivilized threat to white people.
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote in his famous text “Notes on the State of Virginia” that Black women were the preferred sexual partners of orangutans. President Dwight Eisenhower, discussing the desegregation of public schools in the 1950s, once argued that white parents were concerned about their daughters being in classrooms with “big Black bucks” Obama, as a candidate and president, was featured as a monkey or other primate on T-shirts and other merchandise.
Trump, for his part, has a record of intensely personal criticism of the Obamas and of using incendiary, sometimes racist, rhetoric.
In his 2024 campaign, Trump said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” language similar to what Adolf Hitler said to dehumanize Jews in Nazi Germany.
During his first White House term, Trump referred to a swath of developing nations that are majority Black as “shithole countries.” He initially denied using the slur but admitted in December 2025 that he did say it.
When Obama was in the White House, Trump advanced the false claims that the 44th president, who was born in Hawaii, was born in Kenya and was constitutionally ineligible to serve. Trump, in interviews that helped endear him to many conservative voters, repeatedly demanded that Obama produce birth records and prove he was a “natural-born citizen” as required to become president.
Obama eventually released his Hawaii records. Trump finally acknowledged during his 2016 campaign, after having won the Republican nomination, that Obama was born in Hawaii. But he immediately said, falsely, that his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton started those birtherism attacks on Obama.
___ Barrow reported from Atlanta.