President Donald Trump, the most vile racist to hold the office of the presidency in the modern era, posted a video to Truth Social overnight that included a meme depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. After initially defending the image, the White House has now taken it down, blaming it on a staffer, in typical Trumpian fashion.
The image was part of a flood of dozens of posts to Truth Social on Thursday night that ran well into Friday morning. One of the videos started with a discussion about voting machines but ended with a seemingly random image of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama with ape bodies.
When asked about the image by several news outlets on Friday morning, the White House first tried to act like it was no big deal.
“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from [T]he Lion King,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to Axios.
Leavitt tried to play it off as a distraction from real issues, telling the Wall Street Journal: “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
But even some allies of Trump seemed to be shocked by the image, including Sen. Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina, who wrote on X: “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it.” Scott calling it the “most racist” seems like an acknowledgement that Trump regularly posts racist garbage. This just happens to be the most racist example, in his view.
Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, echoed Scott’s sentiment, writing, “Tim is right. This was appalling.”
Tim is right. This was appalling. https://t.co/9LbpP9JxbN
— Sen. Susan Collins (@SenatorCollins) February 6, 2026
Rep. Mike Lawler, a Republican from New York, was also unhappy with the image of the Obamas, writing: “The President’s post is wrong and incredibly offensive — whether intentional or a mistake — and should be deleted immediately with an apology offered.”
Sen. Pete Ricketts, a Republican from Nebraska, also chimed in on X, writing: “Even if this was a Lion King meme, a reasonable person sees the racist context to this. The White House should do what anyone does when they make a mistake: remove this and apologize.”
Sen. Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi also denounced the racist meme, writing, “This is totally unacceptable. The president should take it down and apologize.”
The president’s Truth Social account removed it around noon ET on Friday and told CNN’s Alayna Treene: “A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down.” That excuse obviously conflicts with statements the White House was making just hours earlier.
Some right-wing users on X have said that any outrage is a “hoax” because the image of the Obamas appears to have been included as a result of a screen recording that auto-scrolled to a new video. But that means there are two options: It was intentionally included as a wink and nod to Trump’s most racist supporters. Or it was accidentally included, and Trump simply doesn’t have any control or knowledge of the videos distributed by his own social media accounts. The fact that his White House first defended the video suggests that even if it was an accident, they were ready to embrace the message behind it.
Trump has demonstrated himself to be the most openly racist president since at least Woodrow Wilson, repeatedly calling Somali-Americans “garbage” and saying they should go back to their own country. That racism is one of the reasons the federal government recently invaded Minnesota, terrorizing its citizens in a campaign of retribution against anyone who isn’t white.
But Republicans didn’t denounce Trump’s racist rants against the Somali community. In fact, Rep. Tom Emmer, a Republican from Minnesota, doubled down on Trump’s racism. For whatever reason, the overnight post depicting the Obamas as apes was one step too far for Republicans like Lawler and Scott, which is almost certainly the reason the video was deleted.
Trump’s government has also regularly spread incredibly racist and fascist content on social media, whether it’s DHS sharing a song popular with Nazi creators or Border Patrol sharing a video with anti-semitic slurs over the summer. Each time, Trump’s minions defend the posts as perfectly fine, but sometimes they get deleted under pressure.
Today, Trump folded to the pressure, proving he can back off if people get outraged enough. Unfortunately, it’s pretty much a given that he’ll post something extremely racist again in the near future. The only question is whether people (or the right people in the form of Republicans) get outraged enough to get him to delete it.
Updated with tweets from Sen. Pete Ricketts and Sen. Roger Wicker.
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