WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s social media post featuring former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, as primates in a jungle was deleted after a backlash from both Republicans and Democrats who criticized the video as racist.
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 post was part of a flurry of social media activity on Trump's Truth Social account that amplified his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, despite courts around the country and a Trump attorney general from his first term finding no evidence of fraud that could have affected the outcome.
An Obama spokeswoman said the former president, a Democrat, had no response.
Nearly all of the 62-second clip, which was among dozens of Truth Social posts from Trump overnight, appears to be from a conservative video alleging deliberate tampering with voting machines in battleground states as the 2020 presidential votes were tallied. At the 60-second mark is a quick scene of two primates, with the Obamas' smiling faces imposed on them.
Those frames were taken from a separate video, previously circulated by an influential conservative meme maker. It shows Trump as “King of the Jungle” and depicts a range of Democratic leaders as animals, including Joe Biden, who is white, as a jungle primate eating a banana.
“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 by text, referring to Disney's 1994 feature film, which does not feature the range of jungle primates featured in the original video. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
By noon, the post had been taken down with responsibility placed on a Trump subordinate.
Trump did not comment on the video in the post, which comes in the first week of Black History Month and days after a presidential proclamation that cited “the contributions of black Americans to our national greatness and their enduring commitment to the American principles of liberty, justice, and equality.”
While it was still up, Trump's post drew condemnation from across the political and ideological spectrum.
The Rev. Bernice King, daughter of the assassinated civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., resurfaced her father's words: “Yes. I'm Black. I'm proud of it. I'm Black and beautiful.” She praised Black Americans as “diverse, innovative, industrious, inventive” and added, “We are beloved of God as postal workers and professors, as a former first lady and president. We are not apes.”
The U.S. Senate's lone Black Republican, Tim Scott of South Carolina, called on Trump to take down the post. “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” Scott, who chairs Senate Republicans' midterm campaign arm, said on social media.
Another Republican, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, is white but represents the state with the largest percentage of Black residents. Wicker called the post “totally unacceptable” and said the president should apologize.
NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement, “Donald Trump’s video is blatantly racist, disgusting, and utterly despicable.”
Johnson asserted that Trump is trying anything to distract from economic conditions and attention on the Jeffrey Epstein case files.
“You know who isn’t in the Epstein files? Barack Obama,” Johnson said. "You know who actually improved the economy as president? Barack Obama.”
Trump and the official White House social media accounts frequently repost memes and artificial intelligence-generated videos. As Leavitt did Friday, Trump aides typically dismiss critiques and cast the images as humorous.
There is a long history in the U.S. of powerful white figures associating Black people with animals, including apes, in demonstrably false and racist ways. The practice dates back to 18th century cultural racism and pseudo-scientific theories in which white people drew connections between Africans and monkeys to justify the enslavement of Black people in Europe and North America, and later to dehumanize freed Black people as an uncivilized threat to white people.
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote in his famous text “Notes on the State of Virginia” that Black women were the preferred sexual partners of orangutans. President Dwight Eisenhower, discussing the desegregation of public schools in the 1950s, once argued that white parents were concerned about their daughters being in classrooms with “big Black bucks.” Obama, as a candidate and president, was featured as a monkey or other primate on T-shirts and other merchandise.
Trump, for his part, has a record of intensely personal criticism of the Obamas and of using incendiary, sometimes racist, rhetoric.
In his 2024 campaign, Trump said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” language similar to what Adolf Hitler said to dehumanize Jews in Nazi Germany.
During his first White House term, Trump referred to a swath of developing nations that are majority Black as “shithole countries.” He initially denied using the slur but admitted in December 2025 that he did say it.
When Obama was in the White House, Trump advanced the false claims that the 44th president, who was born in Hawaii, was born in Kenya and was constitutionally ineligible to serve. Trump, in interviews that helped endear him to many conservative voters, repeatedly demanded that Obama produce birth records and prove he was a “natural-born citizen” as required to become president.
Obama eventually released his Hawaii records. Trump finally acknowledged during his 2016 campaign, after having won the Republican nomination, that Obama was born in Hawaii. But he immediately said, falsely, that his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton started those birtherism attacks on Obama.
FILE - Former President Barack Obama talks with then President-elect Donald Trump as Melania Trump reads the funeral program before the state funeral for former President Jimmy Carter at Washington National Cathedral in Washington, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
