On February 6th, Donald Trump posted a video depicting Former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes. Trump claimed he “didn’t see” the racist clip depicting them as monkeys. The clip was set to the song, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”. It was taken at the end of a 62-second video he shared, which contained claims about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. The video was later removed.
When confronted by reporters about the clip, instead of simply apologizing, he said, “I didn’t make a mistake.” He tried to justify posting the video, saying he did not know the clip contained depictions of the Obamas, which evoked criticism from a bipartisan group of members of Congress. As a black republican Senator, Tim Scott said that it was the most racist thing he has ever seen out of the White House.
The clip, which recalls racist caricatures comparing black people to monkeys, appears to be taken from an X (formerly known as Twitter) post shared by a conservative meme creator going by the name “Xerias.” The video also depicts several other high-profile Democrats as animals, including New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The White House initially defended the clip as an “internet meme video” and told critics to “stop the fake outrage,” but after fierce backlash, the post was removed from Trump’s Truth Social account, and a White House official said a staffer had “erroneously” posted it.
In a statement before Scott’s criticism, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed the backlash, saying that the clip came from a longer video that showed Trump as the Lion King and depicted top Democrats as jungle characters. Among others, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) — all longtime rivals of the president — are shown as an elephant, boar, meerkat, and giraffe, respectively.
Sens. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) joined Scott by calling on Trump to delete the post. “Even if this was a Lion King meme, a reasonable person sees the racist context to this,” Ricketts replied on X. “The White House should do what anyone does when they make a mistake: remove this and apologize.” Representative Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) agreed to her point.
Before it was removed, Derrick Johnson, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, called the video “disgusting and utterly despicable” and accused Trump of attempting to distract the public from the Epstein case and a “rapidly failing economy.” Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications in the Obama White House, said: “Let it haunt Trump and his racist followers that future Americans will embrace the Obamas as beloved figures while studying him as a stain on our country.”
Trump has had a long history of criticizing the Obamas, dating back before his second election. Before his first term as president, he made false claims that Barack Obama, who was confirmed to have been born in Hawaii, was a Kenyan native, and not a U.S. citizen, therefore ineligible to run for president. It has been a longstanding lie, and allow me to pose the question: Does graduating from Columbia University in political science and Harvard Law School, two of the most prestigious schools in America, make Barack Obama ineligible to run for president? If you ask me, I don’t know what would make a person more eligible.
Works Cited
Jr, Bernd Debusmann. Trump Shares Video with Racist Clip Depicting Obamas as Apes. 6 Feb. 2026, www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8r8y78g10o.
Svirnovskiy, Gregory. “Trump Deletes Racist Video Depicting Obamas as Monkeys after Bipartisan Backlash.” POLITICO, Politico, 6 Feb. 2026, www.politico.com/news/2026/02/06/donald-trump-obamas-monkey-video-00768745.
