President Trump posted a blatantly racist video clip portraying former President Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama as apes, then deleted it after an unusually strong outcry from members of his own party.
The clip, set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” was spliced near the end of a 62-second video that promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and was posted by Mr. Trump late Thursday night. It was the latest in a pattern by Mr. Trump of promoting offensive imagery and slurs about Black Americans and others.
The decision to delete the link from his social media site was an unusual walk-back by Mr. Trump, whose own press secretary just hours earlier had brushed off criticism of the video as “fake outrage” and made no attempt to distance the president from it.
“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement, before the clip was deleted. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
Mr. Trump offered no immediate explanation for taking down the video, but one person familiar with the decision said that a “staffer” had posted the clip without the president’s knowledge. The person spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the decision-making.
The clip was in line with Mr. Trump’s history of making degrading remarks about people of color, women and immigrants, and he has for years taken aim at the Obamas in particular. Across Mr. Trump’s administration, racist images and slogans have become common on official government websites and social media accounts, with the White House, Labor Department and Homeland Security Department all having promoted posts that echo white supremacist messaging.
The White House usually responds to criticism about such things by laughing it off.
Last month, when the administration admitted to doctoring a photo of Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Minnesota protester, to make the Black civil rights attorney look disheveled and distressed, a spokesman said it was nothing more than a “meme” and that “the memes will continue.”
In October, when Mr. Trump posted an A.I.-generated video depicting Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, with a fake mustache and a sombrero — an image that Mr. Jeffries called racist and bigoted — Vice President JD Vance said he thought it was “funny,” and that the administration was “having a good time.”
But the latest video struck a nerve that the White House did not appear to anticipate. The depiction of Mr. and Mrs. Obama as apes perpetuates a racist trope, used historically by slave traders and segregationists to dehumanize Black people and justify lynchings.
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Senate’s only Black Republican and a close ally of Mr. Trump, wrote on X that he hoped the post was fake “because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it.”
Mr. Scott is the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the party’s campaign arm in charge of holding the Senate, a key role ahead of the midterm elections in November.
Representative Mike Lawler, Republican of New York, said that the president’s post “is wrong and incredibly offensive.” Representative Michael R. Turner, Republican of Ohio, said the “racist images” of the Obamas were “offensive, heart breaking, and unacceptable.”
Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, said the president “should take it down and apologize.”
A spokeswoman for the Obamas declined to comment on the video.
Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mr. Obama go back years. As far back as 2011, Mr. Trump amplified the false “birther” conspiracy theory that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States, but in Kenya, and was therefore an illegitimate president. Last year, Mr. Trump shared an A.I.-generated video of Mr. Obama being arrested in the Oval Office.
The Obamas have rarely commented on Mr. Trump’s remarks over the years, but Mrs. Obama, in a speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention spoke candidly about being the target of racism by Mr. Trump.
“For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us,” Mrs. Obama said. “See, his limited and narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard-working, highly educated, successful people who happened to be Black.”
“It’s his same old con,” she added, “doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people’s lives better.”
Mr. Trump and the White House have long circulated fake and A.I.-generated content to mock his political foes, but in his second term, the racist undertones have become more overt.
Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, said that the video was “just hard-boiled racism using the oldest trope against Black people imaginable.”
Mr. Trump’s use of A.I.-generated content has brought once-fringe content into the mainstream. Hundreds of users, posting anonymously each day, have produced thousands of artificial intelligence-powered videos and images displaying their fondness for the Trump administration and mocking the president’s enemies. Their work is often crude and sometimes racist.
Mr. Trump has become a prolific re-poster of such content.
The president and a handful of trusted aides have access to his account on Truth Social, his social media site. He often shares posts himself. At other times, he dictates posts to one of his aides or has an aide share a post that has been prepared for him, including updates on international relations and political endorsements. The end result is a patchwork of policy, political bluster and, increasingly, A.I. memes and deepfakes, all posted under the umbrella of the presidential social media account.
The video he reposted on Thursday, one of dozens he posted in the late hours, starts off as a look at conspiracies about the 2020 election. It originally aired during a 2021 event hosted by Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow and one of the most prolific spreaders of 2020 election misinformation.
Narrating is Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who was subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 Committee for efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
At the end, spliced in, is the clip portraying the Obamas, which appeared to have been taken from a video that was shared in October by a user on X with the caption “President Trump: King of the Jungle,” and an emoji of a lion.
In that video, several high-profile Democrats — including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and former Vice President Kamala Harris — were shown as various animals, while Mr. Trump was depicted as a lion. The Obamas, in the clip, were shown as apes. The video ended with the animals bowing down to Mr. Trump.
Quentin James, a co-founder of the Collective PAC, which aims to elect Black officials in America, likened the video to a “digital minstrel show.”
“The fact that a sitting president is now using A.I. to circulate the same dehumanizing imagery that appeared in 19th-century propaganda should alarm every American, regardless of party,” Mr. James said. “This is the through-line from minstrelsy to Truth Social, and the intent is identical: to strip Black people of their humanity for political entertainment.”
Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Dylan Freedman, Robert Jimison and Katie Rogers contributed reporting from Washington.
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
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