‘I didn’t make a mistake’: Trump declines to apologise for racist video of Obamas

Washington: President Donald Trump posted a blatantly racist video clip portraying former President Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama as apes, but he insisted he had nothing to apologise for even after he deleted the video following an outcry.

The clip, set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” was spliced near the end of a 62-second video that promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and was among a flurry of links posted by Trump late Thursday night. It was the latest in a pattern by Trump of promoting offensive imagery and slurs about Black Americans and others.

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Friday, Trump said he only saw the beginning of the video. “I just looked at the first part, it was about voter fraud in some place, Georgia,” Trump said. “I didn’t see the whole thing.”

He then tried to deflect blame, suggesting he had given the link to someone else to post. “I gave it to the people, generally they’d look at the whole thing but I guess somebody didn’t,” he told reporters.

Still, Trump offered no contrition when pressed. “No, I didn’t make a mistake,” he said.

The White House response to the video over the course of the day — from defiance to retreat to doubling down — was a remarkable glimpse into an administration trying to control the damage in the face of widespread outrage, including from the president’s own party.

The clip was in line with Trump’s history of making degrading remarks about people of color, women and immigrants, and he has for years singled out the Obamas. Across Trump’s administration, racist images and slogans have become common on government websites and accounts, with the White House, Labor Department and Homeland Security Department all having promoted posts that echo white supremacist messaging.

But the latest video struck a nerve that appeared to take the White House by surprise. The depiction of the Obamas as apes perpetuates a racist trope, historically used by slave traders and segregationists to dehumanise Black people and justify lynchings.

At first, the president’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, brushed off criticism of the video and made no attempt to distance the president from it.

“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 Friday morning. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

But a clear voice of disapproval emerged from Republicans on Capitol Hill, who are typically reluctant to call out the president and rarely do so in the forceful tones heard Friday.

Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Senate’s only Black Republican and a close ally of Trump, wrote on the social media platform X that he hoped the post was fake “because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”

“The President should remove it,” he said.

Scott is the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the party’s campaign arm in charge of trying to hold the Senate, a key role leading up to the midterm election in November.

Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., said the president’s post “is wrong and incredibly offensive.” Rep. Michael R. Turner, R-Ohio, said the “racist images” of the Obamas were “offensive, heart breaking, and unacceptable.” Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said the president “should take it down and apologise.”

After the post had been up for about 12 hours, Trump deleted it — a remarkable retreat by a president who has long been accused of demeaning people of color.

As the criticism continued to grow, Trump allies sought to deflect blame from the president by vouching for his character and saying an unidentified staffer was at fault. A pastor with ties to Trump claimed he had spoken directly to the president on Friday and that Trump said he had not posted the video and knew the imagery in it was “wrong, offensive and unacceptable.”

Trump did not go nearly that far in his remarks on Air Force One.

The president regularly uses Truth Social to communicate his views; he and a handful of trusted aides have access to his account. His feed is a patchwork of policy, political bluster and, increasingly, AI memes and deepfakes.

The White House usually responds to criticism about such things by doubling down, laughing it off or suggesting that critics cannot take a joke.

Last month, when the administration admitted to doctoring a photo of Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Minnesota protester, to make the Black civil rights attorney look disheveled and distressed, a spokesperson said that it was nothing more than a “meme” and that “the memes will continue.”

In October, when Trump posted an AI-generated video depicting Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader, with a fake mustache and a sombrero — an image that Jeffries called racist and bigoted — Vice President JD Vance said that he thought it was “funny,” and that the administration was “having a good time.”

Doug Heye, a GOP strategist, said the response this time from Republicans was unusual. The White House, he said, “realised what a colossal screw-up this was, and they realised that because elected Republicans were directly pushing back on them for one of the rare times we’ve ever seen.”

A spokesperson for the Obamas declined to comment on the video.

Trump’s attacks on Obama go back years. As far back as 2011, Trump amplified the false “birther” conspiracy theory that Obama was not born in the United States, and questioned the legitimacy of his presidency. Last year, Trump shared an AI-generated video of Obama being arrested in the Oval Office, and later in prison.

The Obamas have rarely responded to Trump’s attacks over the years, but Michelle Obama, in a speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, spoke candidly about being the target of racism by Trump.

“For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us,” she said. “See, his limited and narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hardworking, highly educated, successful people who happened to be Black.”

“It’s his same old con,” she added, “doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people’s lives better.”

Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, said that the video was “just hard-boiled racism using the oldest trope against Black people imaginable.”

Trump’s use of AI-generated content has brought once-fringe content into the mainstream. Hundreds of users, posting anonymously each day, have produced thousands of videos and images displaying their fondness for the Trump administration and mocking the president’s enemies. Their work is often crude and sometimes racist.

Trump has become a prolific reposter of such content.

He often shares posts himself in late-night outbursts, like the string of posts he made on Thursday night. At other times, he dictates posts to one of his aides or has an aide share a post that has been prepared for him, including updates on international relations and political endorsements. Many of his posts are conspiratorial or cruel mockery of his opponents.

The video he reposted Thursday starts off as a look at conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. It originally aired during a 2021 event hosted by Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow and one of the most prolific spreaders of 2020 election misinformation.

Narrating is Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who was subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee for efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

At the end, spliced in, is the clip portraying the Obamas, which appeared to have been taken from a video that was shared in October by a user on X with the caption “President Trump: King of the Jungle.”

In that video, several high-profile Democrats — including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City, former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris — were shown as various animals, while Trump was depicted as a lion. The video ended with the animals bowing down to Trump. (The president shared only the part of the video where the Obamas are shown as apes.)

Quentin James, a cofounder of the Collective PAC, which aims to elect Black officials in America, likened the video to a “digital minstrel show.”

“The fact that a sitting president is now using AI to circulate the same dehumanising imagery that appeared in 19th-century propaganda should alarm every American, regardless of party,” James said. “This is the through line from minstrelsy to Truth Social, and the intent is identical: to strip Black people of their humanity for political entertainment.”