MILWAUKEE (AP) — Milwaukee coach Doc Rivers reiterated Friday that the Bucks have no plans to shut down Giannis Antetokounmpo for the rest of the season, though the two-time MVP’s return date from a calf strain remains uncertain.
Rivers spoke on the issue during the Bucks’ pregame availability a day after the trade deadline passed with Antetokounmpo remaining in Milwaukee. Antetokounmpo’s future had been the center of attention across the league in the weeks leading up to the deadline.
“He’s going to play when he’s healthy,” Rivers said. “We’ve just got to make sure he’s healthy. He’s getting close. He’s working out. He looks good. I would say hopefully sooner than later.”
The Bucks, who are 12th in the Eastern Conference standings, potentially could help their draft status by continuing to rest Antetokounmpo. Milwaukee will pick either in its own spot or in New Orleans’ spot in the first round, depending on which spot is less favorable.
Milwaukee entered Friday 15-15 with Antetokounmpo and 5-14 without him.
Antetokounmpo hasn’t played since straining his right calf on Jan. 23. Antetokounmpo said the night of the injury that he expected to be told he would miss four to six weeks, though the Bucks haven’t specified any timetable.
Whether Antetokounmpo is playing or not, his mere presence after the trade deadline lifted the spirits of the Bucks. They’d been dealing pretty much all season with reports that their star player was on the way out.
“It definitely addresses the elephant that we had in the room for the past few weeks, month or so,” guard Gary Harris said. “Now it’s time to focus, lock in. Rumors, speculation, all that stuff is done.”
As the deadline passed, Antetokounmpo issued a social media post with the message: “Legends don’t chase. They attract,” accompanying a meme of the scene from the movie “The Wolf of Wall Street” in which Leonardo DiCaprio's character repeatedly yells, “I'm not leaving."
“I think it was a relief,” Rivers said. “I thought Giannis’ tweet was a unifying thing for all the players as well.”
Rivers had been steadfast throughout the season in saying the speculation surrounding Antetokounmpo’s potential exit was overblown.
“I kept saying it, but no one wanted to hear it,” Rivers said. “I don’t think I ever wavered on what was going to happen. It bothered me because the talk was almost like people were trying to manifest him out of Milwaukee. But I’m glad it’s over.”
It’s not really over, though. The uncertainty surrounding Antetokounmpo’s future has just been pushed back a bit.
Antetokounmpo could remain with the Bucks for just a few more months or for years to come.
He becomes eligible to sign a four-year contract extension worth up to $275 million in October. Antetokounmpo has one year remaining on the three-year, $186 million extension he signed in 2023, though he also has a $62.8 million player option for 2027-28.
Antetokounmpo repeatedly has said he loves playing in Milwaukee, but he also has talked about how much he wants to play on a team that's committed to competing for championships. He led the Bucks to their first title in half a century in 2021.
Milwaukee has made plenty of moves designed at lengthening its championship window over the last few years, yet the Bucks have lost in the first round of the playoffs each of the last three seasons. Their slow start this season has put their streak of nine straight playoff berths in serious jeopardy.
General manager Jon Horst’s mission is to show Antetokounmpo the Bucks can return to title contention in short order if the nine-time all-NBA forward sticks around.
Horst has done it before.
Antetokounmpo signed one contract extension in 2020 after the Bucks acquired Jrue Holiday, a move that sparked Milwaukee to its 2021 championship. He signed another extension in 2023 after the Bucks made another blockbuster move to bring Damian Lillard to Milwaukee.
Horst showed his willingness to be creative in overhauling Milwaukee’s roster last summer, when he waived the injured Lillard and stretched out the remaining money the Bucks owed him over the next five seasons to gain the cap flexibility to sign Myles Turner.
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Milwaukee Bucks' Giannis Antetokounmpo watches from the bench during the first half of an NBA basketball game Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
Milwaukee Bucks' Giannis Antetokounmpo blows a bubble on the bench during the first half of an NBA basketball game Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s racist social media post featuring former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, as primates in a jungle was deleted Friday after a backlash from both Republicans and Democrats who criticized the video as offensive.
Trump said later Friday that he won't apologize for the post. “I didn't make a mistake,” he said.
The Republican president’s Thursday night post was 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. A rare admission of a misstep by the White House, the deletion came hours after press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed “fake outrage” over the post. After calls for its removal — including by Republicans — the White House said a staffer had posted the video erroneously.
The post was part of a flurry of overnight 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 Trump's first-term attorney general finding no evidence of systemic fraud.
Trump has a record of intensely personal criticism of the Obamas and of using incendiary, sometimes racist, rhetoric — from feeding the lie that Obama was not a native-born U.S. citizen to crude generalizations about majority-Black countries.
The post came in the first week of Black History Month and days after a Trump proclamation cited “the contributions of black Americans to our national greatness” and “the American principles of liberty, justice, and equality.”
An Obama spokeswoman said the former president, a Democrat, had no response.
Nearly all of the 62-second clip appears to be from a conservative video alleging deliberate tampering with voting machines in battleground states as 2020 votes were tallied. At the 60-second mark is a quick scene of two jungle primates, with the Obamas’ smiling faces imposed on them.
Those frames originated from a separate video, previously circulated by an influential conservative meme maker. It shows Trump as “King of the Jungle” and depicts 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.
Disney's 1994 feature film that Leavitt referenced is set on the savannah, not in the jungle, and it does not include great apes.
“Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public,” Leavitt added.
By noon, the post had been taken down, with responsibility placed on a Trump subordinate.
Trump, answering questions from reporters accompanying him aboard Air Force One on Friday night, said the video was about fraudulent elections and that he liked what he saw.
“I liked the beginning. I saw it and just passed it on, and I guess probably nobody reviewed the end of it,” he said. “Anytime I see that stuff and when it’s credible, you put it up. But somebody slipped and missed a very small part.”
Asked if he condemned the racist parts of the video, Trump said, “Of course I do.”
The White House explanation raises questions about control of Trump’s social media account, which he's used to levy import taxes, threaten military action, make other announcements and intimidate political rivals. The president often signs his name or initials after policy posts.
The White House did not immediately respond to an inquiry about how posts are vetted and when the public can know when Trump himself is posting.
Mark Burns, a pastor and a prominent Trump supporter who is Black, said Friday on X that he'd spoken “directly” with Trump and that he recommended to the president that he fire the staffer who posted the video and publicly condemn what happened.
“He knows this is wrong, offensive, and unacceptable,” Burns posted.
Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., told The Associated Press she does “not buy the White House's commentary.”
“If there wasn’t a climate, a toxic and racist climate within the White House, we wouldn’t see this type of behavior regardless of who it’s coming from,” Clarke said, adding that Trump “is a racist, he’s a bigot, and he will continue to do things in his presidency to make that known.”
Trump and White House social media accounts frequently repost memes and artificial intelligence-generated videos. As Leavitt did Friday, Trump allies typically cast them as humorous.
This time, condemnations flowed from across the spectrum — along with demands for an apology that had not come by late afternoon.
At a Black History Month market in Harlem, the historically Black neighborhood in New York City, vendor Jacklyn Monk said Trump’s post was embarrassing even if it was eventually deleted. “The guy needs help. I'm sorry he's representing our country. … It’s horrible that it was this month, but it would be horrible if it was in March also.”
In Atlanta, 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.” Black Americans, she said, “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,” said Scott, who chairs Senate Republicans' midterm campaign arm.
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.
Some Republicans who face tough reelections this November voiced concerns, as well. The result was an unusual cascade of intraparty criticism for a president who has enjoyed a stranglehold over fellow Republicans who stayed silent during previous Trump controversies for fear of a public spat with the president or losing his endorsement in a future campaign.
NAACP President Derrick Johnson called the video “utterly despicable” and pointed to Trump's wider political concerns that could help explain Republicans' willingness to speak out. 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,” he said. “You know who actually improved the economy as president? Barack Obama.”
There is a long history in the U.S. of powerful white figures associating Black people with animals, including apes, in demonstrably false, racist ways. The practice dates to 18th century cultural racism and pseudo-scientific theories used to justify the enslavement of Black people, and later to dehumanize freed Black people as uncivilized threats 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 school desegregation in the 1950s, suggested white parents were rightfully concerned about their daughters being in classrooms with “big Black bucks.” Obama, as a candidate and president, was featured as a monkey or other primates on T-shirts and other merchandise.
In his 2024 campaign, Trump said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” language similar to what Adolf Hitler used to dehumanize Jews in Nazi Germany.
During his first White House term, Trump called a swath of majority-Black, developing nations “shithole countries.” He initially denied saying it but admitted in December 2025 that he did.
When Obama was in the White House, Trump pushed false claims that the 44th president, who was born in Hawaii, was born in Kenya and constitutionally ineligible to serve. Trump, in interviews that helped endear him to conservatives, demanded that Obama prove he was a “natural-born citizen” as required to become president.
Obama eventually released birth records, and Trump finally acknowledged during his 2016 campaign, after having won the Republican nomination, that Obama was born in Hawaii. But immediately after, he said, falsely, that his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton started the birtherism attacks.
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters on the South Lawn before departing the White House, Friday, Feb. 6, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
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)
