Trump’s racist post about Obamas deleted after backlash
The deletion came hours after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed there was nothing offensive about the post.
Donald Trump’s social media post featuring a video about election conspiracy theories and a racist depiction of former president Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, as primates in a jungle has been deleted.
The Republican president’s Thursday night post was deleted on Friday and blamed on a staff member after a widespread backlash, including from civil rights leaders and 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 said there was nothing offensive about 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 Mr 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 Mr 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 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 Mr Trump as “King of the Jungle” and depicts a range of Democratic leaders as animals, including Joe Biden, 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,” Ms 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.
Mr 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, Mr 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 US Senate’s lone Black Republican, Tim Scott of South Carolina, called on Mr 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,” Mr Scott, who chairs Senate Republicans’ mid-term campaign arm, said on social media.
Another Republican, Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, who is white but represents the state with the largest percentage of black residents, called it “totally unacceptable” and said the President should apologise.
NAACP president Derrick Johnson said in a statement: “Donald Trump’s video is blatantly racist, disgusting, and utterly despicable.”
He said 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,” Mr Johnson said. “You know who actually improved the economy as president? Barack Obama.”
Mr Trump and the official White House social media accounts frequently repost memes and artificial intelligence-generated videos. As Ms Leavitt did on Friday, Trump aides typically dismiss critics and cast the images as humorous.
