Washington, Feb 7: President Donald Trump’s racist social media post featuring former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, as primates in a jungle was deleted after a backlash from both Republicans and Democrats who criticised the video as offensive.
Trump said later Friday that he won’t apologise for the post: “I didn’t make a mistake,” he said.
The Republican president’s Thursday night post was blamed on a staffer after widespread backlash, from civil rights leaders to veteran Republican senators, for its treatment of the nation’s first Black president and first lady.
A rare admission of a misstep by the White House, the deletion on Friday came hours after press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed “fake outrage” over the post. After calls for its removal – including by 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 around the country and Trump’s first-term attorney general finding no evidence of systemic fraud.
Trump has a record of intensely personal criticism of the Obamas and of using incendiary, sometimes racist, rhetoric – from feeding the lie that Obama was not a native-born US citizen to crude generalisations about majority-Black countries.
The post came in the first week of Black History Month and days after a Trump proclamation cited “the contributions of black Americans to our national greatness” and “the American principles of liberty, justice, and equality”.
An Obama spokeswoman said the former president, a Democrat, had no response.
Nearly all of the 62-second clip appears to be from a conservative video alleging deliberate tampering with voting machines in battleground states as 2020 votes were tallied. At the 60-second mark is a quick scene of two jungle primates, with the Obamas’ smiling faces imposed on them.
Those frames originated from a separate video, previously circulated by an influential conservative meme maker. It shows 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 by text.
By noon, the post had been taken down, with responsibility placed on a Trump subordinate.
Trump, answering questions from reporters, said the video was about fraudulent elections and that he liked what he saw.
“I liked the beginning. I saw it and just passed it on, and I guess probably nobody reviewed the end of it,” he said.
Asked if he condemned the video’s racism, Trump said, “Of course I do.” (AP)
