Trump video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys sparks outrage; White House calls it ‘internet meme’
President Donald Trump triggered a wave of condemnation from top Democrats after posting a Truth Social video that briefly depicts Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, and former first lady Michelle Obama as monkeys. The White House dismissed the criticism as “fake outrage,” saying the clip was an online meme.
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The roughly one-minute video, posted late yesterday, promotes conspiracies about Trump’s 2020 election loss. Near the end, the Obamas’ faces appear superimposed on monkeys’ bodies for about one second as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays.
“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.”
As of early this morning, the post had been liked several thousand times on Trump’s social media platform.
Democrats denounced the imagery as racist. California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office wrote on X: “Disgusting behavior by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this. Now.” Ben Rhodes, a former top national security adviser to Barack Obama, said on X: “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.”
Barack Obama remains the only Black American to have served as president, from 2009 to 2017. He backed Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race against Trump, a rivalry that has continued to animate U.S. politics.
Trump rose to political prominence championing the debunked “birther” conspiracy theory falsely alleging that Obama had misrepresented his U.S. birth. The two men have had a long-running feud marked by Trump’s derision of Obama’s popularity and his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has intensified his use of hyper-realistic but fabricated AI visuals on Truth Social and other platforms, often glorifying himself while lampooning critics — a tactic that has reliably rallied his conservative base.
Last year, he posted an AI-generated video depicting Obama being arrested in the Oval Office and later appearing behind bars in an orange jumpsuit. He also shared an AI clip of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — who is Black — wearing a fake mustache and a sombrero. Jeffries called that image racist.
Trump’s second-term agenda has drawn fire from opponents for what they describe as a broad campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. One of his first acts in office this term was to terminate all federal DEI programs, including related policies in the military. The push to root out what Trump labels “woke” initiatives has coincided with the removal from some military academy bookshelves of scores of titles addressing the history of racial discrimination in the United States.
Federal anti-discrimination and equal-opportunity programs trace their roots to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, led largely by Black Americans in pursuit of equality after the end of slavery in 1865 and the decades of institutional racism that followed.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
