Fox News Went Most of the Day Without Mentioning Trump’s Obama Ape Video That Even Republicans Criticized

(Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP photo)(Screenshot via Truth Social)

President Donald Trump’s now-deleted post with a video depicting former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes sent shockwaves through the political world Friday, dominating the day’s news cycle and even sparking some rarely-seen critiques from Republicans.

But in Rupert Murdoch’s television empire, it was ignored until the sun had set.

Thursday evening, Trump posted a video with baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election that included a short clip at the end of the Obamas’ faces superimposed on apes’ bodies. The video was furiously criticized by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, members of the media, and other political commentators as racist.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt initially defended the post as simply sharing an “Internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle” and dismissed critics as voicing “fake outrage.”

But shortly before noon ET Friday, the post was deleted, and a still-unnamed White House staffer was blamed for making an “erroneous” post.

The controversy made “Obama” and related terms trend on multiple social media platforms for hours Friday — an uncommon thing since his presidency ended nine years ago — and the story was all over cable news programs.

All over cable news — with two notable exceptions, that is.

A review of the entire day’s programming on both the Fox News Channel and Fox Business found not one single mention of the story all day long Friday until after 6 pm ET as the weekend kicked off, on Special Report with Bret Baier.

Using Snapstream’s transcript search function, Mediaite looked for mentions of “Obama,” “Truth Social,” “gorilla,” “ape” and “tim scott.” Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) is the only Black GOP Senator and was one of the earliest Republicans to criticize Trump’s post, explicitly calling it “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”

The story was not covered at all, neither to defend nor criticize the president, report on the reactions to the post, or mention it at all, until Bret Baier’s program spent slightly more than two minutes on it.

“The White House is engaged in damage control tonight over a posting on the president’s social media account that many people are calling racist,” said Baier. “The images of Barack and Michelle Obama as primates are being blamed on a staff member. They have been removed from the site.”

Fox News senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy reported that it was “unclear if President Trump ever even saw this image of the Obamas that was tacked onto the end of an unrelated video before it was posted to his account,” adding that “some of the president’s closest allies pressured him to take it down, which he did.”

The White House’s messaging “was supposed to be all about TrumpRX.gov,” Doocy said, but the controversy “upended” that plan, with “some of the president’s most reliable public allies” breaking with the White House to criticize the post.

Doocy described the video as “an AI-generated post depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as primates flashed on the screen toward the end of the video about alleged voting abnormalities to the president’s Truth Social account overnight.”

As Doocy spoke, the image below was displayed on the screen, with a large “A.I. GENERATED IMAGE” label across it and partially obscuring Michelle Obama’s face; this label was not present in the original video.

Screenshot via Fox News.

“It has been taken down,” Doocy said. “The post has since been deleted from the president’s Truth Social account. Alabama Republican Senator Katie Britt, who frequently appears alongside the president in the Oval Office, said this content was rightfully removed, should have never been posted to begin with, and is not who we are as a nation.”

The panel on Baier’s show also briefly discussed the deleted post later in the hour as they discussed the TrumpRX program.

Harold Ford praised Sen. Scott’s comments, saying “they were succinct, they were powerful, and thankfully they were heeded.”

The post showed “incredibly poor judgment and bad decision-making,” said Kimberley Strassel, questioning who was the staffer who allegedly made the post and why they still had a job. Strassel added that this controversy had “sidelined” the White House’s economic message and distracted from the TrumpRX rollout.

Fox News Digital covered the story with one article but it is not highlighted or featured on the site. Shortly after 7 pm ET, one had to scroll down past over a dozen stories on the Fox News homepage (about 4 screens’ worth on a laptop browser) to get to it. Fox News host Laura Ingraham also confronted Leavitt about the post during an interview in the 7 pm ET hour.

Watch the clip above via Fox News.

This article has been updated with additional information.

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