Despite Earlier White House Defense, Trump Deletes Meme and Blames Staffer as Backlash Grows Over Post Targeting Barack and Michelle Obama
Donald Trump used his social media account Thursday night to share a video promoting election conspiracy theories that includes a racist depiction of former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as primates in a jungle setting.
The post immediately drew backlash for its treatment of the nation’s first Black president and first lady. It was part of a burst of Truth Social activity in which Trump amplified his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, despite courts nationwide and his own former attorney general finding no evidence of widespread fraud that could have changed the outcome.
The Republican president’s Thursday night post was deleted Friday and blamed on a staffer after widespread backlash, from civil rights leaders to veteran Republican senators, for its treatment of the nation’s first Black president and first lady.
The deletion, a rare admission of a misstep by the White House, came hours after press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed “fake outrage” over the post. After calls for its removal for being racist, including by Republicans, the White House said a staffer had posted the video erroneously and it had been taken down.
The 62-second clip appears largely drawn from a conservative video alleging deliberate tampering with voting machines in battleground states during the 2020 vote count. Near the end of the video, a brief scene shows two primates with the Obamas’ smiling faces superimposed on them. Those images originated from a longer meme video that portrays Trump as the “King of the Jungle” and depicts several Democratic leaders as animals, including President Joe Biden, who is white, shown as a primate eating a banana.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt rejected criticism of the post, saying it was taken from an internet meme meant to depict Trump as dominant over Democrats and dismissing the backlash as “fake outrage.” Trump did not comment directly on the video in his post. An Obama spokesperson did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is Black and chairs Senate Republicans’ midterm campaign arm, publicly criticized the post, calling it the most racist thing he had seen from the White House and urging the president to remove it. The anti-Trump group Republicans Against Trump also condemned the post, writing online that “there’s no bottom.”
Trump and official White House accounts frequently repost memes and artificial intelligence-generated videos, with aides often brushing off criticism by framing the content as humor. The former president has a long history of personal attacks on the Obamas and of using racially charged rhetoric.
During his 2024 campaign, Trump said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” language historians have compared to rhetoric used by Adolf Hitler. During his first term, he referred to several majority-Black developing nations as “shithole countries,” initially denying the remark before later acknowledging he used the language.
Trump also promoted the false “birther” conspiracy theory during Obama’s presidency, repeatedly claiming Obama was born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible to serve. Obama eventually released his Hawaii birth records. Trump acknowledged during the 2016 campaign that Obama was born in Hawaii but falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton had started the birther attacks.
