Trump Posts Video Depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as Apes

(Allison Robbert | Credit: AP) (Screengrab via Truth Social)

President Donald Trump shared a 2020 election conspiracy video to Truth Social on Thursday night that briefly depicts former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes.

The now-deleted 62-second video, shared at 11:44 p.m. ET, is largely focused on pushing a conspiracy about manipulated vote-counting machines that projected former President Joe Biden would win states like Georgia. But an AI clip spliced into the end of the video shows the faces of the Obamas superimposed on apes’ bodies for roughly a second, accompanied by The Tokens’ song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

The clip carries a watermark linked to a pro-Trump account on X with tens of thousands of followers.

(Screengrab via Truth Social)

It is unclear whether the president was aware of the imagery included in the video, which he posted minutes after sharing a history of the Black conservative movement.

The post came as part of another late-night social media spree featuring reshared posts on Jeffrey Epstein, the upcoming midterm elections, and claims that elections have been manipulated while attacking Democratic opponents.

The video drew quick backlash from Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans, who accused the president of amplifying racist imagery.

“Disgusting behavior by the President,” California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office wrote on X. “Every single Republican must denounce this. Now.”

The account Republicans Against Trump added: “Trump just posted a video on Truth Social that includes a racist image of Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys. There’s no bottom.”

The Bulwark, which originated as a Never Trump conservative site, also lashed out:

While some MAGA influencers protested that screengrabs circulating of the video were AI and fake, Mediaite confirmed that the post remained on Trump’s feed as of early Friday morning, and a record of its existence saved by users on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, before it was deleted late Friday morning.

CNN White House correspondent Alayna Treene reported noted the post had been up for 12 hours and quoted a senior White House official as saying: “A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down.”

Responding on Friday, before the post was scrubbed, Leavitt defended the post in comment to PBS, slamming the “fake outrage” by the media, and said the controversial clip was from a meme that had depicted Trump as “King of the Jungle.”

The longer version of the video, first published online in October by the same X account with its watermarked the video Trump shared, casts the president as a lion while portraying prominent Democrats and liberals as animal characters from Disney’s The Lion King. That longer video also depicts Hillary Clinton as a warthog and New York mayor Zohran Mamdani as a hyena.

The post comes amid an intensifying pattern of attacks by Trump on Obama during his second term. In recent months, Trump has accused the former president of “treason” over a conspiracy theory linked to intelligence assessments related to allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Trump has also previously shared AI-generated videos depicting Obama’s arrest and incarceration.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!