Trump posts the Obamas as apes

Karoline Leavitt released a gaslighting statement trying to defend the gutter racism coming out of the Oval Office before they eventually caved and deleted it.

Last night, on the 5th day of Black History Month, President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated video clip on Truth Social that falsely claims the 2020 election was stolen from him and depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as dancing apes in the jungle, to the tune of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

The stunningly racist video drew such instant and widespread outrage on the internet that even MAGA Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) felt compelled to break ranks with Trump and condemn it. Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate and chair of the GOP Senate Campaign Committee, posted on X: “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it.”

Scott, of course, knows the post wasn’t “fake,” in the sense that Trump’s account did actually post it. Per Zeteo’s Asawin Suebsaeng, Trump may not be the one clipping and publishing his own racist videos, but he personally approves them all:

According to sources intimately familiar with the matter, video and photo posts to the president’s Truth Social account go through layers of approval. Trump signs off on the content posted, but he often does not find, and certainly does not clip or upload, these clips himself. He is often presented with a menu of options by senior aides for approval, and the footage or images are reviewed by advisers, such as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino.

White House Press Sec Karoline Leavitt did her typical gaslighting rounds this morning and claimed the clip was fine because it was originally part of a larger video depicting Trump as the Lion King. “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. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.” Of course, there is no pair of ape characters in The Lion King, and Trump didn’t post the rest of the video showing any other characters from the movie—just the Obamas as primates, which suggests that he and his handlers simply wanted to post the Obamas as primates.

Less than an hour later, the White House changed their tune entirely and told reporters the post had actually been “erroneously made” by a staffer and taken down.

This claim would be bullshit on its face, but it’s made worse by the fact that Leavitt had already defended the ape video and called outrage about it “fake” before the White House took it down and claimed it was posted by accident.

What it looks like to me is that the president and his allies have been posting so much gutter racism on Truth Social, X, and elsewhere—keep in mind that Elon Musk is openly white supremacist now and flooding the zone with neo-Nazi content—that they didn’t expect this kind of uproar over the ape video. They didn’t expect it to make front page headlines in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and be splashed across cable news, because they thought they’d worn the media down to the point where we just accepted a certain level of rank bigotry as the new normal.

I’m thinking now about the book event I went to last night, which could not be more relevant this morning. My dear friend and former colleague Chris Matthias wrote a new book about antifa called To Catch a Fascist, which reads like a spy thriller and which I highly recommend, and he did a Q+A with acclaimed independent journalist Marisa Kabas at the Brooklyn Heights Library. Chris has been reporting deeply on antifa’s fight to expose the radical right for years, and last night he talked about the Nazi meme-ification of American politics and how it’s created some of the worst moments in our electoral history—like the claim J.D. Vance amplified that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating people’s pet cats and dogs. What happens in many of these situations is that faceless neo-Nazis on the internet generate these racist memes and inject them into the mainstream via bots and trolls as Trump-supporting political commentary, and then when the White House itself actually regurgitates them as propaganda, it moves fringe racism into the realm of the acceptable.

Mathias said something last night that really resonated with me, which is that one of the biggest challenges of being a journalist covering politics or covering the far right at this moment is maintaining one’s sense of shock. It would be too easy to be confronted with Trump posting a racist meme about the Obamas and think, is this even news anymore? He’s always been racist. His posts are always offensive. He’s an asshole, yeah, we know.

On the other hand, the official social media account of the president of the United States posted a video depicting the nation’s only Black president and his wife as apes, while his roving gang of paramilitary thugs is kidnapping brown children and sending them to American-made concentration camps. This is a shocking development on top of a shocking moment in history, and no amount of outrage, actually, should feel like enough. And the fact that the White House was shamed hard enough that they backed off and took the video down is a reminder that they’re weaker and smaller than they like to pretend.