US President Donald Trump has removed a social media video which included a racist clip depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
The clip – set to the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight – was at the end of a 62-second video containing claims about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
Republican Senator Tim Scott – who is black – had called for the president to remove the post, describing it as “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House”.
The White House initially defended the clip as an “internet meme video” and told critics to “stop the fake outrage”.
The clip – which is reminiscent of racist caricatures comparing black people to monkeys – appears to be taken from an X post shared by conservative meme creator Xerias in October.
That video also depicts several other high-profile Democrats as animals, including New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Trump’s predecessor in the White House, Joe Biden, also is depicted as an ape eating a banana.
The Obamas have yet to comment on the video.
While the president offered no comment in his post, his sharing of the video – one of dozens posted on his Truth Social account overnight – sparked a fierce backlash.
Some criticism came from within Trump’s own party.
Senator Scott, a black South Carolina Republican and an ally of Trump, posted that he was “praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House”.
“The President should remove it,” he added.
Another Republican, New York representative Mike Lawler, called the post “wrong and incredibly offensive – whether intentional or a mistake” and said it “should be deleted immediately with an apology offered.”
In a statement sent to the BBC, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the clip is from “an internet meme video depicting President 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,” she added.
Later on Friday, a White House official said that a staffer “erroneously” made the post, which has since been taken down.
Before it was removed, Derrick Johnson, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, called the video “disgusting and utterly despicable” and accused Trump of attempting to distract the public from the Epstein case and a “rapidly failing economy.”
“You know who isn’t in the Epstein files? Barack Obama. You know who actually improved the economy as president? Barack Obama,” he added.
Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser for strategic 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 country.”
In a short post of his own, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said that “Donald Trump is a racist”.
“Disgusting behaviour by the president,” the office of California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote on X. “Every single Republican must denounce this. Now.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries – who himself accused Trump of racism last year after he shared an AI-image depicting Jeffries with a mustache and sombrero – responded to the recent video by calling Trump a “vile, unhinged and malignant bottom feeder.”
“Every single Republican must immediately denounce Donald Trump’s disgusting bigotry,” he added.
The clip of the Obamas was added to the end of a minute-long video which included claims about a voting conspiracy in Michigan in the 2020 presidential election. Those claims were debunked as part of Dominion Voting System’s successful civil legal actions against some media companies.
Trump also has a long history of criticising and attacking Obama.
Before his first term as president, Trump regularly made false claims that the Hawaii-born Obama was actually born in Kenya and therefore was ineligible to be president.
He later acknowledged that Obama was born in the US.
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