WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said on Friday that he would not apologise after a racist social media post depicting former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as primates was deleted following widespread backlash from both Republicans and Democrats.
“I didn’t make a mistake,” Trump said later on Friday.
The Republican president’s Thursday night post was removed after criticism from civil rights leaders and senior Republican senators, who condemned the video as offensive. The White House initially blamed the post on a staff member, calling it an error.
The deletion marked a rare admission of a misstep by the White House and came hours after press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed criticism as “fake outrage”.
After calls for its removal — including from Republicans — the White House said a staffer had posted the video erroneously.
The post was part of a flurry of overnight activity on Trump’s Truth Social account that amplified his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, despite courts across the country and Trump’s own first-term attorney general finding no evidence of systemic fraud.
Trump has a record of intensely personal attacks on the Obamas and of using incendiary, sometimes racist, rhetoric — from promoting the false claim that Obama was not a native-born US citizen to making crude generalisations about majority-Black countries.
The post appeared during the first week of Black History Month, just days after Trump issued a proclamation praising “the contributions of Black Americans to our national greatness” and “the American principles of liberty, justice, and equality”. A spokeswoman for Obama said the former president had no response.
Nearly all of the 62-second clip appeared to come from a conservative video alleging deliberate tampering with voting machines in battleground states during the 2020 election count.
At around the 60-second mark, a brief scene shows two jungle primates with the Obamas’ smiling faces superimposed on them.
Those frames originated from a separate video previously circulated by a prominent conservative meme creator. The video portrays Trump as “King of the Jungle” and depicts Democratic leaders as animals, including Joe Biden — who is white — as a jungle primate eating a banana.
“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 in a text message.
Disney’s 1994 film, however, is set on the savannah, not in the jungle, and does not feature great apes.
“Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public,” Leavitt added.
By midday, the post had been removed, with responsibility placed on a subordinate.
The explanation raised questions about oversight of Trump’s social media account, which he has used to announce policy decisions, threaten military action, levy import taxes and attack political rivals. The president often signs or initials posts he authors himself.
The White House did not immediately respond to questions about how posts are vetted or how the public can tell when Trump himself is posting.
Mark Burns, a pastor and prominent Black Trump supporter, said on X that he had spoken “directly” with Trump and urged him to dismiss the staffer responsible and publicly condemn the post.
“He knows this is wrong, offensive, and unacceptable,” Burns wrote.
Congressional Black Caucus chairwoman Yvette Clarke, a Democrat from New York, said she did “not buy the White House’s commentary”.
“If there wasn’t a toxic and racist climate within the White House, we wouldn’t see this type of behaviour, regardless of who it’s coming from,” Clarke said, adding that Trump “is a racist, he’s a bigot, and he will continue to do things in his presidency to make that known”.
Trump and official White House accounts frequently repost memes and AI-generated videos, which allies typically frame as humour. This time, condemnation came from across the political spectrum, along with demands for an apology that had not been issued by late Friday.
At a Black History Month market in Harlem, vendor Jacklyn Monk said the post was embarrassing even though it was later deleted.
“The guy needs help. I’m sorry he’s representing our country. It’s horrible — especially this month, but it would be horrible in March too,” she said.
In Atlanta, the Reverend Bernice King, daughter of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, cited her father’s words: “Yes, I’m Black. I’m proud of it. I’m Black and beautiful.”
Black Americans, she said, “are beloved of God — as postal workers and professors, as a former first lady and president. We are not apes.”
The US Senate’s only Black Republican, Tim Scott of South Carolina, called for the post’s removal.
“Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” said Scott, who chairs Senate Republicans’ midterm campaign arm.
Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, who is white but represents the state with the highest percentage of Black residents, called the post “totally unacceptable” and said Trump should apologise.
Several Republicans facing difficult re-elections later this year also voiced concern, resulting in an unusual wave of intra-party criticism for a president who has historically maintained strong control over his party.
NAACP president Derrick Johnson described the video as “utterly despicable” and suggested Trump was attempting to distract from economic issues and scrutiny over the Jeffrey Epstein case files.
“You know who isn’t in the Epstein files? Barack Obama,” Johnson said. “You know who actually improved the economy as president? Barack Obama.”
There is a long history in the US of powerful white figures associating Black people with animals, particularly apes, in racist and demonstrably false ways. The practice dates back to 18th-century cultural racism and pseudo-scientific theories used to justify slavery and later to dehumanise freed Black people.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia that Black women were preferred sexual partners of orangutans. President Dwight Eisenhower, discussing school desegregation in the 1950s, suggested white parents were right to fear their daughters being in classrooms with “big Black bucks”.
Obama, both as a candidate and as president, was depicted as a monkey or other primates on merchandise and in political imagery.
During his 2024 campaign, Trump said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country”, echoing language used by Adolf Hitler to dehumanise Jews. During his first term, Trump referred to several majority-Black developing nations as “shithole countries”, a remark he initially denied but later admitted making.
Trump also promoted false claims that Obama, who was born in Hawaii, had been born in Kenya and was therefore constitutionally ineligible to serve as president. Although Obama released his birth records, Trump continued to push the lie until acknowledging during the 2016 campaign that Obama was born in Hawaii — while falsely blaming Hillary Clinton for starting the conspiracy.