Only black Republican senator says Trump video showing Obama couple as monkeys ‘is the most racist thing I’ve seen come out of the White House’

US Senator Tim Scott, from the Republican Party, participates in a House committee hearing on February 4, 2026 KEVIN DIETSCH / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / GETTY IMAGES VIA AFP Tim Scott, the only black senator from the US Republican Party, said this Friday (6) that the video published by President Donald Trump in which the Obamas are compared to monkeys is “the most racist thing I have ever seen come out of this White House”. The White House dismissed complaints about the post, calling it “false outrage” over an internet meme. Scott, in turn, said he was “praying it was fake” and asked Trump to remove it. The President of the United States, Donald Trump, published on Thursday (5) a video that portrays former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as monkeys. The piece drew condemnation from several Democratic leaders. Trump publishes video with Obama couple as monkeys The office of California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, condemned the publication, which he called “disgusting behavior.” At the end of the one-minute video with a conspiracy theory about the elections, published on the Truth Social platform, the Obamas’ faces appear superimposed on the bodies of monkeys for about a second. The song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays in the background when the Obamas appear. The two have no relation to the “denouncement” of the American president. The video repeats false claims that the vote counting company Dominion Voting Systems helped steal the 2020 election from Trump. In a statement, the White House rejected what it called “fake outrage” from critics. “This is an internet meme video that shows President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King. Please stop the fake outrage and report something today that really matters to the American public,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to AFP. READ ALSO: Trump administration again accuses China of carrying out nuclear weapons tests and expanding its arsenal without ‘limits or transparency’ Donald Trump’s post shows the Obama couple as monkeys. Reproduction/truthsocial/@realDonaldTrump The video received thousands of ‘likes’ in the early hours of Friday on the president’s social network. The office of California Governor Gavin Newsom, a potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2028 and a vocal critic of Trump, condemned the publication. “Disgusting behavior by the President. Every Republican must report this. Now”, published the account of Newsom’s press office on the social network X. Ben Rhodes, former National Security Advisor and close ally of Barack Obama, also condemned the images. “Let Trump and his racist followers be haunted because Americans of the future will see the Obamas as beloved figures, while studying him as a stain on our history,” he wrote in with religious leaders on February 5, 2026 Saul Loeb/AFP AI Images In the first year of his second term in the White House, Trump intensified his use of AI-generated images on Truth Social and other platforms, often to celebrate his name and attempt to ridicule his critics. The American president uses provocative publications to mobilize his conservative base. Last year, Trump published an AI-generated video that showed Barack Obama being detained in the Oval Office and appearing behind bars, wearing an orange prison uniform. A few months later, he published an AI-produced clip of Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader in the House of Representatives — who is black — with a fake mustache and hat. Jeffries called the image racist. ‘Anti-woke’ agenda Since his return to the White House, Trump has been the target of criticism from opponents for leading a campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. One of the first measures of the second Trump administration was to end all federal government DEI programs, including diversity policies within the Armed Forces. The move to end what Trump called “woke” initiatives also led to the removal from military academies libraries of dozens of books that cover the history of discrimination in the United States. American federal programs to combat discrimination were born out of the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s, led mainly by African Americans, a movement in favor of equality and justice after hundreds of years of slavery, whose abolition in 1865 gave way to the imposition of other institutional forms of racism.

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