Recommendations of the Editorial team
President Donald Trump published a series of social media posts late Thursday evening (February 5) and into Friday morning (February 6), including one videoin which Barack and Michelle Obama are portrayed as monkeys, set to the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
The Obamas’ clip, which appears to have been created using AI, appears toward the end of a 62-second video about election conspiracy theories. Trump released the video just before midnight on Thursday, and it was still up on his Truth Social page as of Friday morning.
The White House defended the post. “This is an Internet meme video that portrays President Trump as the king of the jungle and the Democrats as characters from ‘The Lion King,'” wrote press secretary Karoline Leavitt in a statement. “Please stop your feigned outrage and report on something that actually matters to the American public today.”
The video is the latest entry in the right’s long history of racism against the Obamas. Before the 2012 presidential election, Trump famously spread the “birther” conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was actually born in Africa and not a U.S. citizen. “An ‘extremely credible source’ called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fake,” he tweeted this year. Obama had already published his detailed birth certificate a year earlier in order to take the wind out of the sails of the conspiracy theory.
Democrats condemn Trump post
Democrats were quick to condemn the post on Friday, which portrayed the Obamas as monkeys.
“Disgusting behavior by the President,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office wrote shortly after Trump posted the clip. “Every single Republican must condemn this. Now.”
“Trump is a vile, racist old man. The people in the @HouseGOP who don’t speak out on this, I assume are supporting this racism,” wrote Rep. Herb Conaway (D-N.J.), who is Black.
“It is to haunt Trump and his racist supporters that future Americans will revere the Obamas as beloved figures while viewing him as a blot on our history,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s national security adviser, posted on X.
“All Republicans will pretend they didn’t see it, but no reporter should let them get away with it,” wrote Dan Pfeiffer, another former Obama adviser.
