Trump video showing Obamas as monkeys sparks outrage over 'vile' racist depiction

US President Donald Trump on Thursday posted an election conspiracy video that depicted former president Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as monkeys, drawing condemnation from prominent Democrats.

Near the end of a one-minute-long video posted on Trump's Truth Social platform, the Obamas are shown with their faces on the bodies of monkeys for about one second.

The song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" plays in the background when the Obamas appear.

The video repeats false allegations that ballot-counting company Dominion Voting Systems helped steal the 2020 election from Trump.

As of early Friday morning, the video had been liked several thousand times on the president's social media platform.

The office of California Governor Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate and a prominent Trump critic, slammed the post.

"Disgusting behavior by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this. Now," Newsom's press office account posted on X.

House Democrati 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,"  calling Trump a "sick individual."

Ben Rhodes, a former top national security advisor and close confidant to Barack Obama, also condemned the imagery.

"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.

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'Fake outrage'

The White House however initially dismissed the condemnations 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," Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to AFP.

But 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," a White House official told AFP.

Obama is the only Black president in American history and backed Trump's opponent Kamala Harris on the campaign trail in the 2024 presidential election.

Trump has a long history of intensely personal criticism of the Obamas and of using incendiary, sometimes racist, rhetoric. 

When Obama was in the White House, Trump advanced the false claims that the 44th president, who was born in Hawaii, was born in Kenya and was constitutionally ineligible to serve. 

Obama eventually released his Hawaii records. Trump finally acknowledged during his 2016 campaign, after having won the Republican nomination, that Obama was born in Hawaii.

AI imagery

In the first year of his second term in the White House, Trump ramped up his use of hyper-realistic but fabricated visuals on Truth Social and other platforms, often glorifying himself while lampooning his critics.

He has used the provocative posts to rally his conservative base.

Last year, Trump posted a video generated by artificial intelligence showing Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office and appearing behind bars in an orange jumpsuit.

Later, he posted an AI clip of Jeffries – who is Black – wearing a fake moustache and a sombrero. 

Jeffries called the image racist.

Since returning to the White House, Trump has drawn criticism from his opponents for leading a crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes.

One of Trump's first acts was to terminate all federal government DEI programmes, including related policies in the military.

The drive to rid the armed forces of what Trump has derided as "woke" initiatives has also seen the removal from some military academy bookshelves of scores of books that cover the US's history of discrimination.

US federal anti-discrimination programs were born of the 1960s civil rights struggle, mainly led by Black Americans, for equality and justice after hundreds of years of slavery, whose abolition in 1865 saw other institutional forms of racism enforced.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and AP)