US President Donald Trump has deleted a post with a racist video depicting former US president Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys, sparking outrage across the US political spectrum on Friday before deleting it in a rare backtrack.
The White House initially dismissed “fake outrage” over the video posted late Thursday night on Trump’s Truth Social account, only to later blame the post on an error by a staff member.
Democrats had slammed Trump as “vile” over the post about the Obamas—the first Black president and first lady in US history—while a senior Republican senator said the video was blatantly racist.
The Obamas were shown with their faces on monkey bodies for about a second near the end of the one-minute-long video promoting conspiracies about Republican Trump’s 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
The song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays in the background when the Obamas appear.
The video, uploaded at 11.44 pm Thursday amid a flurry of other posts, repeated false allegations that ballot-counting company Dominion Voting Systems helped steal the election from Trump.
At first, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt played down the row, saying the images were “from an internet meme video depicting Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King.”
“Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public,” Leavitt said in a statement to AFP.
However, almost exactly 12 hours after the post appeared on Trump’s account, there was an unusual concession from an administration that normally refuses to admit the slightest mistake.
“A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down,” a White House official told AFP.
The Obamas did not respond to the post, but outrage from some members of Trump’s own Republican party prompted the about-face.
Tim Scott, the only Black Republican senator and 2024 presidential candidate, called the video “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House” and called for Trump to remove it.
