Trump administration says it was wrong to post a montage of the Obama couple as monkeys and takes down the post after 12 hours on air

Trump publishes video with Obama couple as monkeys Donald Trump’s government said this Friday (6) that the publication of a video that portrays former US president Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, as monkeys was an employee’s “error”, as a White House official told Reuters. Even so, the post was up for almost 12 hours, from the end of Thursday night (5) until this Friday afternoon. The publication was deleted after a wave of criticism from Democrats and Republicans. Before that, the White House spokeswoman had downplayed the video, which she called an “internet meme”, and dismissed the criticism. ✅ Follow the g1 international news channel on WhatsApp “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. Perhaps Trump prefers the label of racist to that of pedophile, says Flávia Oliveira Although the video was published on Donald Trump’s personal account on his Truth Social social network, a member of the White House told the Reuters news agency that the post was made by a US government official “in error”. The North American president had not yet commented on the controversy until the last update of this report. Donald Trump’s video post shows the Obama couple as monkeys. Reproduction/truthsocial/@realDonaldTrump ➡️ 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. The publication had received thousands of likes on the US president’s social network in the early hours of Friday. The office of California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, condemned the post, which it called “disgusting behavior.” Tim Scott, the Republican Party’s only black senator, called the video “the most racist thing I’ve ever seen come out of this White House.” READ ALSO: Trump administration again accuses China of testing nuclear weapons and expanding its arsenal without ‘limits or transparency’ 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 X. Obama is the only black president in US history and supported Trump’s rival, Kamala Harris, in the 2024 election race. Trump, during a meeting with religious leaders on February 5, 2026 Saul Loeb/AFP In the first year of his second term in the White House, Trump intensified the use of images generated by Artificial Intelligence on Truth Social and other platforms. The American president often 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, the Republican 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 a 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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