Trump’s racist post about the Obamas was deleted after backlash despite the White House defending it earlier

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s social media post showing former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle Obama as monkeys in the jungle has been deleted after backlash from both Republicans and Democrats who criticized the video as racist.

The Republican president’s post was deleted Thursday evening, Friday, and a staffer was blamed after widespread backlash, from civil rights leaders to veteran Republican senators, over his treatment of the nation’s first black president and first lady. The deletion, a rare admission of wrongdoing by the White House, came hours after press secretary Carolyn Leavitt dismissed “fake outrage” over the post. After calls for it to be removed for being racist – including from Republicans – the White House said a staffer wrongly posted the video and it was 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, even though courts across the country and Trump’s own attorney general from his first term have found no evidence of fraud that could affect 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 made by Trump overnight, appears to be taken from a conservative video alleging intentional manipulation of voting machines in hotly contested states during the 2020 presidential vote count. At the 60-second mark, a quick scene of two primates appears, with the Obamas’ smiling faces superimposed on them.

“Internet meme”

These frames were taken from a separate video, previously circulated by an influential conservative meme maker. The film shows Trump as the “King of the Jungle” and depicts a group of Democratic leaders as animals, including Joe Biden, who is white, as a banana-eating jungle monkey.

“This is from an online video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King,” Levitt said in a text, referring to the 1994 Disney feature film, which does not feature the group of jungle primates that appeared in the original video. “Please stop the fake outrage and report today on something that actually matters to the American public.”

By noon, the position had been removed and the responsibility placed on one of Trump’s subordinates.

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 noted Black Americans’ “contributions to our national greatness and their enduring commitment to the American principles of freedom, justice, and equality.”

Condemnation across the political spectrum

While the matter was still standing, Trump’s post drew condemnation from across the political and ideological spectrum.

The Rev. Bernice King, daughter of assassinated civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., has her father’s words resurfaced: “Yes. I’m black. I’m proud of it. I’m black and beautiful.” She praised black Americans as “diverse, innovative, hardworking and creative” and added: “We are loved by God as postal workers and professors, as former first ladies and presidents. We are not monkeys.”

Tim Scott, the only black Republican in the US Senate, from South Carolina, called on Trump to dismiss the position. “The prayer was fake, because it’s the most racist thing I’ve ever seen outside of this White House,” Scott, who heads the 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 black population. Wicker called the post “completely unacceptable” and said the president should apologize.

“Donald Trump’s video is blatantly racist, disgusting, and absolutely despicable,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement.

Johnson confirmed that Trump is trying anything to divert attention from the economic situation and attention to the files of the Jeffrey Epstein case.

“Do you know who’s not 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 videos generated by artificial intelligence. As Levitt did on Friday, Trump aides typically dismiss the criticism as funny.

Long history of racism

There is a long history in the United States of powerful white figures associating black people with animals, including apes, in ways that are clearly racist and wrong. This practice dates back to 18th-century cultural racism and pseudoscientific theories in which whites linked connections between Africans and apes to justify the enslavement of blacks in Europe and North America, and later to dehumanize freed blacks 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, while discussing public school desegregation in the 1950s, once claimed that white parents were concerned about having their daughters in classrooms with “big black money.” Obama, both as a candidate and as president, has appeared as a monkey or other primate on T-shirts and other merchandise.

For his part, Trump has a record of intense personal criticism of the Obama family and use of inflammatory, and sometimes racist, rhetoric.

In his 2024 campaign, Trump said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” language similar to Adolf Hitler’s dehumanization of Jews in Nazi Germany.

During his first term in the White House, Trump referred to a group of majority-black developing countries as “shithole countries.” He initially denied using the slur but admitted in December 2025 that he actually said it.

When Obama was in the White House, Trump made false claims that the 44th president, who was born in Hawaii, was born in Kenya and was constitutionally ineligible to serve. Trump has repeatedly demanded, in interviews that have helped endear him to many conservative voters, that Obama provide birth records and prove he is a “natural born citizen” as required to become president.

Obama finally released his Hawaiian recordings. Trump finally admitted during his 2016 election campaign, after winning the Republican nomination, that Obama was born in Hawaii. But he immediately said, falsely, that his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, was the one who started the fanatical attacks on Obama.

Barrow reported from Atlanta.