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Thursday night, Donald Trump posted something racist enough to break through on social media—a rarity, as his offensive social media posts often go ignored these days. But the visceral, undeniable racism of this particular iteration, and the White House’s initial refusal to express any remorse, pushed it through. And at least one Republican senator expressed disapproval: Sen. Tim Scott, who is Black, called it “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”
The source of all this commotion was a screengrab of a video Trump posted on Truth Social depicting the heads of former first lady Michelle Obama and former President Barack Obama laughing, open-mouthed, on ape bodies.
The screengrab is real, and the underlying video it comes from is stranger than one might expect. Trump posted the video on Truth Social at 8:44 p.m. on Thursday, and it’s actually largely about election fraud, taking you through baseless and frankly dull conspiracy theory material. But at the end, for about two seconds, it flashes to a bright jungle scene, featuring the laughing Obamas, to the tune of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
The last two seconds appeared to be clipped into the video for shock humor, meant to throw a laugh in for the racists who had made it all the way through. There is no mitigating “context” here. With or without the election-fraud part, it was the Black president and first lady, depicted as apes, in one of the oldest and most dehumanizing racist tropes in history.
At first, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to defend the post as being “from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the king of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King.” She added: “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
And, sure, the original video that those bizarre last seconds were taken from does indeed show Trump as a lion and Democrats as figures that could conceivably be thought of as Lion King characters—Hillary Clinton as Pumbaa, Hakeem Jeffries as Timon—bowing to him. But there are no ape characters in the Lion King. The video is generated by A.I., and is not in the animated style of the 1993 animated film but is instead standard A.I. slop. Perhaps the A.I. added in the additional characters to muddle the racism of depicting the Obamas as apes, but the fact remains that it opens with the scene of the Obamas, and lingers on it longer than the others.
And the creator of the video is not known for his delicacy or tact. Per the watermark and his own claims on X, the creator, who has Pepe the Frog for an avatar, is the same internet user behind the infamous October slop video of Trump dumping sewage onto protesters from a fighter jet. That video shocked people for its raw animosity toward legal protesters practicing their First Amendment rights, as well as for the profoundly juvenile behavior from a sitting president. If you scroll through the creator’s more recent material, it appears he pretty much exclusively makes similarly mindless, low-quality slop content with obvious MAGA messages. Other videos have included Tom Homan as a Jedi fighting protesters in Minneapolis; Don Lemon being arrested and twerking in prison; and Alex Pretti, who was fatally shot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, being hit with a car and thrown, cartoonishly, into the air.
Even if the original video had no racist intent, which it does, defending the original video makes no sense: Trump didn’t post the original video. He posted a two-second clip of the Obamas as apes. The message is clear.
The one valid defense would be one of ignorance. We can’t know exactly how Trump encountered this video. It’s unclear if Trump watched the entire clip, meaning maybe he didn’t see those two seconds at the end. The White House claimed it was a staffer who actually posted it. But given the highly nonstrategic style of the account’s posting that evening—another post was of an inoffensive TikTok featuring a dog eager to be fed whipped cream, classic Trump stuff—it seems a strange kind of post for a staffer.
Much more crucially, the White House left the video up once they learned of the racist section. Trump did not apologize. The White House did eventually take it down, but only after it had been up for 12 hours.
Trump has done and said many other aggressively anti-Black things in his years in the public eye; this video is not the worst. But it still says something profound about the president and his administration that they were made aware of thoroughly ugly racism coming from the president’s own messages and chose not to apologize to Black Americans or correct the error, but instead to turn against the public.
