President Donald Trump shared a video on his social media account promoting election conspiracy theories, which included a racist depiction of former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, as primates in a jungle.
The Republican president’s Thursday night post drew a backlash for its treatment of the nation’s first black president and first lady, News.Az reports, citing foreign media.
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It was part of a flurry of social media activity that amplified Mr Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, despite courts around the country and a Trump attorney general from his first term finding no evidence of fraud that could have affected the outcome.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt rejected criticism of the post that depicted the Obamas, who are Democrats.
Nearly all of the 62-second clip, which was among dozens of Truth Social posts from Mr Trump overnight, appears to be from a conservative video alleging deliberate tampering with voting machines in battleground states as the 2020 presidential votes were tallied.
At the 60-second mark is a quick scene of two primates, with the Obamas’ smiling faces imposed on them.
Those frames were taken from a longer video, previously circulated by an influential conservative meme maker.
It shows Mr Trump as “King of the Jungle” and depicts a range of Democratic leaders as animals, including Joe Biden, who is white, as a 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,” Ms Leavitt said by text, referring to Disney’s 1994 feature film. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
The group, Republicans Against Trump, criticised the post and its “racist image”.
“There’s no bottom,” the group wrote.
Mr Trump and the official White House social media accounts frequently repost memes and artificial intelligence-generated videos.
Mr Trump also has a long history of intensely personal criticism of the Obamas and of using incendiary, sometimes racist, rhetoric.
In his 2024 campaign, he said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country”, language similar to what Adolf Hitler said to dehumanise Jews in Nazi Germany.
When Mr Obama was in the White House, Mr Trump advanced the false claims that the 44th president, who was born in Hawaii, was born in Kenya and was constitutionally ineligible to serve.
Mr Trump repeatedly demanded that Mr Obama produce birth records and prove he was a “natural-born citizen” as required to become president.
Mr Obama eventually released his Hawaii records. Mr Trump finally acknowledged during his 2016 campaign, after having won the Republican nomination, that Mr Obama was born in Hawaii.
