Update: The controversial Truth Social post has been removed as of Friday morning, with a senior White House official telling CNN’s Alayna Treene: “A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down.”
Original: The White House defended President Donald Trump on Friday after a late Thursday night post on his Truth Social account featured an AI-generated clip of President Barack and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes.
“This is from an Internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from ‘The Lion King,’” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
The video in question, which was posted twice, lasts 1:02 and mostly covers a conspiracy theory related to voting machines and rigged elections. The final two seconds of the video run into a second screen-recorded clip, which depicts the Obamas as monkeys, set to the tune of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
That full clip, first posted in October, also features Hillary Clinton as a warthog and Zohran Mamdani as a hyena.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office responded on X, writing, “Disgusting behavior by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this. Now.”
This is not Trump’s first brush with a racism scandal, as he has been accused of being both a racist and a bigot in the past due to his public views on Black people and other minorities.
Per Leavitt’s advice, reporting on something that “actually matters” to the American public would likely include looking into the number of times Trump’s name appears in the DOJ’s recently released Epstein files. Around 5,300.
