February 7, 2026 | 09:52 am
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - President Donald Trump has posted a election conspiracy video with racist depictions of former president Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, as monkeys, sparking condemnation.
As reported by France24, towards the end of a one-minute video uploaded on Trump's Truth Social platform, the faces of Obama and his wife were superimposed on monkey bodies for about a second.
The song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" played in the background as Obama and his wife appeared.
The video repeats the false accusation that the Dominion Voting Systems helped steal the 2020 election from Trump.
As of Friday morning, the video had been liked thousands of times on the president's social media platform.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate and a prominent Trump critic, condemned the post.
"Disgusting behavior by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this. Now," Newsom's press office account posted on X.
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries on Friday branded Trump's video as "vile, unhinged and malignant."
In a post on X, Jeffries said, "Every single Republican must immediately denounce Donald Trump's disgusting bigotry," referring to Trump as a "sick individual."
Ben Rhodes, a former top national security advisor and close confidant of Barack Obama, also condemned the depiction.
"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 history," he wrote on X.
Fake Outrage
However, the White House initially dismissed the criticism as "fake outrage."
"This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King. Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public," said Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt in a statement.
However, several hours later, the White House said a staff member had "erroneously" made the Obama post, which was then deleted.
"A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down," said a White House official.
Obama is the only Black president in American history and has endorsed Trump's opponent, Kamala Harris, in the 2024 presidential election campaign.
Trump has a long history of intense personal criticism against Obama using incendiary, sometimes racist, rhetoric.
While Obama was in the White House, Trump falsely claimed that the 44th president, who was born in Hawaii, was actually born in Kenya and constitutionally ineligible to serve.
Obama eventually released his birth records from Hawaii. Trump ultimately acknowledged during his 2016 campaign, after winning the Republican nomination, that Obama was born in Hawaii.
AI Imagery
In the first year of his second term in the White House, Trump increased the use of hyper-realistic but fabricated visuals on Truth Social and other platforms, often glorifying himself while mocking his critics.
He used these provocative posts to rally his conservative base.
Last year, Trump posted an AI-generated video showing Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office and appearing behind bars wearing orange prisoner garb.
He then posted an AI clip of Jeffries—who is black—wearing a fake mustache and sombrero. Jeffries called the image racist.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has faced criticism from his opponents for leading a campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
One of Trump's first acts was to end all federal government DEI programs, including related policies in the military.
The effort to cleanse the armed forces of what Trump called "woke" initiatives also led to the removal of dozens of books from the bookshelves of several military academies that discussed the history of discrimination in the US.
US federal anti-discrimination programs stem from the 1960s civil rights struggle, largely led by Black Americans. This fight for equality and justice after the abolition of slavery in 1865 led to the elimination of institutional forms of racism and other discrimination.
Read: Trump Posts AI-Generated Video Depicting Obama's Arrest
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