During the first week of Black History Month, U.S. President Donald Trump posted a video featuring former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama depicted as apes.
Their faces were attached to cartoon ape bodies in a cartoon jungle in what looks to be an artificial-intelligence generated animation with the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” playing in the background. It showed up at the end of a video with misinformation and falsehoods about alleged election fraud. Trump posted it late Thursday night.
By Friday, the clip was buried under a stream of videos and posts from the president.
“Disgusting behavior by the President,” said a Friday morning X post from the office of California Gov. Gavin Newsom of the clip. “Every single Republican must denounce this. Now.”
“Trump is a vile racist old man,” said Rep. Herb Conaway (D-N.J.) of the post. “The people in the @HouseGOP that don’t speak out on this, I’m going to assume you support this racism.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt provided this statement to media outlets, including CNN, following the backlash.
“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” Leavitt said, though the video does not appear to have any connection to the Disney film from 1994. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
Polls show that racism is an issue that matters to the American public – as of last August, Gallup polling found that 64% of Americans believed that racism against Black people was widespread in the U.S. A racist environment can be dangerous or even deadly. Research published in the BMJ journal in 2022 studied racism as a leading cause of death in the U.S.
Regarding the particular trope included in the video the president shared, The New York Times referred to it as “the racist trope that won’t die” in 2018. Dehumanization of Black people was also linked to racial discrimination and violence against Black people in a 2008 study.
Trump has landed in hot water for comments about race in the past, including his false claim that former Vice President Kamala Harris (who has half Jamaican and half Indian ancestry) “happened to turn Black,” while on the campaign trail in 2024. He has also claimed that immigrants were hurting the Black community in the U.S.
Last summer, Trump also said he thought that Obama should be arrested for treason, a crime punishable by death. Trump has a long history of attacking Obama, going back to his false claims that the former president wasn’t a U.S. citizen and continuing through December, when a portrait of Obama calling him “divisive” was included along with other plaques at the White House.
Obama once joked about Trump’s birth certificate claims during a White House Correspondents Dinner. He did actually reference “The Lion King” in a parody clip at the event. Michelle Obama called Trump a “weak man” on the day of the 2024 presidential election.
Recently, Obama has also been speaking out against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. That crackdown has already resulted in the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens by federal agents.
“More and more Americans are voicing their outrage at the tactics being deployed by federal agents in Minnesota,” Obama said in an X post last month. “But it’s important to understand the broader implications of what this administration is doing, and the threat it poses to the basic freedoms of every American.”
After backlash from Democrats and Republicans, Trump’s post disappeared from Truth Social late Friday morning. The White House told CNN just before noon that a “White House staffer erroneously made the post,” and confirmed that it had been taken down.
“A source familiar with the matter said GOP lawmakers had called Trump to discuss the post with him,” the outlet added.