White House Shrugs Off ‘Fake Outrage’ Over Trump Post Depicting Obamas as Apes

Associated Press

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has dismissed criticism of President Donald Trump for having shared an AI-generated video on Truth Social depicting former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes.

The president shared the now-deleted 62-second video on Thursday, just before midnight, which pushes a conspiracy about manipulated vote-counting machines but concludes by cutting to an AI clip that shows the faces of the Obamas superimposed on apes’ bodies for roughly a second, accompanied by the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

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

Responding on Friday, Leavitt defended the post in comment to PBS and said the controversial clip was from a meme that had depicted Trump as “King of the Jungle” over other lawmakers.

This 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.

The longer version of the video, first published online in October by the same X account as that watermarked onto 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.

Hours later CNN White House correspondent Alayna Treene reported late Friday morning that the post had been deleted from the president’s feed. It had been up for 12 hours, she noted. Treene quoted a senior White House official as saying: “A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down.”

This article has been updated.

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