Editor’s be aware: This story accommodates offensive imagery.
Washington — President Trump posted to social media late Thursday an election-conspiracy video that features racist footage depicting former President Barack Obama and former first girl Michelle Obama as apes.
The video, which is simply over a minute lengthy, promotes false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged towards Mr. Trump. Towards the tip of the video is a roughly two-second clip that exhibits the Obamas’ heads edited onto the our bodies of primates, with the tune “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” enjoying.
Mr. Trump shared the video to his Reality Social account at 11:44 p.m. Thursday.
Obama was the nation’s first Black president and Michelle Obama was the primary Black first girl. Mr. Trump has a historical past of sharing disparaging and racist memes concerning the Obamas. The president additionally amplified for years a conspiracy principle that Obama was born in Kenya and subsequently ineligible to function president. Amid stress to disavow the so-called “birther” declare, Mr. Trump finally said in the course of the 2016 presidential marketing campaign that “President Obama was born in the USA. Interval.”
There was no response from the Obamas and thus far, they haven’t responded to a request for remark.
White Home press secretary Karoline Leavitt mentioned, “That is from an web meme video depicting President Trump because the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King. Please cease the faux outrage and report on one thing immediately that really issues to the American public.”
@realDonaldTrump
The original video that Leavitt referenced was shared on X final October by the consumer @xerias_x, who declared, “President Trump: King of the Jungle.” The 55-second-long video seems to be generated by AI and opens with Obama and Michelle Obama’s heads superimposed onto apes’ our bodies.
The unique video depicts quite a few different Democrats as animals, together with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as a warthog, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a donkey and Senate Democratic Chief Chuck Schumer as a zebra. Former President Joe Biden additionally seems as a primate, and former Vice President Kamala Harris is pictured as a turtle.
Mr. Trump is portrayed within the video as a lion.
The Obamas are the one Democrats within the clip shared by the president on Reality Social on Thursday.
South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, a Republican, denounced the footage and urged Mr. Trump to take away the video.
“Praying it was faux as a result of it is essentially the most racist factor I’ve seen out of this White Home,” the senator mentioned in a social media post. Scott is the longest-serving Black senator in U.S. historical past and chairs the Nationwide Republican Senatorial Committee.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, a California Democrat who often spars with the president, denounced the video shared by Mr. Trump late Thursday.
“Disgusting habits by the President. Each single Republican should denounce this. Now,” his press workplace wrote on social media.
The president has continued to say, regardless of intensive proof on the contrary, that the 2020 presidential election was rife with fraud and that he, not Biden, was the winner. However dozens of lawsuits filed by his marketing campaign and Republican allies in search of to overturn the ends in key battleground states have been dismissed by federal judges. Invoice Barr, who served as lawyer basic throughout Mr. Trump’s first time period, mentioned the Justice Division did not uncover evidence of widespread fraud that will’ve modified the end result of the 2020 election.
The video shared by Mr. Trump makes unfounded allegations about voting machines from Dominion Voting Techniques, a voting expertise firm. The claims have been raised by among the president’s allies within the wake of the 2020 election and led to defamation lawsuits by the corporate.
Dominion argued in fits towards Fox Information and Newsmax that the networks defamed it by broadcasting unfounded allegations that Dominion had rigged the election towards Mr. Trump and its software program manipulated vote counts. The voting firm additionally sued Rudy Giuliani, the previous New York Metropolis mayor, for repeatedly peddling false claims concerning the 2020 election in interviews.
Fox Information agreed in 2023 to pay Dominion $787.5 million as a part of a settlement to resolve the defamation case and Newmax agreed to pay the voting firm $67 million final August. Giuliani and Dominion reached a settlement final September, although the phrases are confidential.
Former particular counsel Jack Smith told House investigators in December that Giuliani “disavowed quite a lot of the claims” he made publicly concerning the integrity of the 2020 election in an interview together with his workforce. Smith oversaw the prosecution of Mr. Trump associated to his alleged effort to subvert the switch of energy after the 2020 election. The president had denied wrongdoing and the case was dropped after he gained a second time period in November 2024.
