US President Donald Trump triggered outrage after he posted a video depicting Barack Obama, the first black president in American history, and his wife Michelle as monkeys.
A top Democrat called Trump “vile” while even a senior Republican senator said the video posted the president’s own Truth Social account was blatantly racist.
But the White House was unrepentant over Trump’s post, rejecting what it called “fake outrage” and saying the video was from an “internet meme”.
Near the end of the one-minute video promoting conspiracies about Republican Trump’s 2020 election loss, the Obamas are shown with their faces on the bodies of monkeys for about one second.
The song The Lion Sleeps Tonight plays in the background when the Obamas appear.
The video repeats false allegations that ballot-counting company Dominion Voting Systems helped steal the 2020 election from Trump and hand victory to Joe Biden, who was Obama’s vice president at the time.
As of early Saturday, the video had been liked several thousand times on the president’s social media platform.
The White House said the post was made in error by a staff member, and has been removed.
“A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down,” an official told AFP.
“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to AFP.
“Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public,” added Leavitt.
There was no immediate reaction from the Obamas.
But the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, called Trump “vile, unhinged and malignant” and a “sick individual”.
“Every single Republican must immediately denounce Donald Trump’s disgusting bigotry,” Jeffries posted on X.
During negotiations to avoid a US government shutdown last year Trump posted a video of Jeffries, who is black, wearing a fake moustache and a sombrero. Jeffries called the image racist.
There was one unusually strong expression of outrage from Trump’s own party.
Tim Scott, the only black Republican senator and a contender for the 2024 presidential nomination, called the video “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House”.
Scott said he was “praying it was fake” and called for Trump to remove it.
The office of California Governor Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate and a prominent Trump critic, slammed “disgusting behaviour”.
Ben Rhodes, a former top national security adviser and close confidant to Barack Obama, also condemned the imagery.
“Let it haunt Trump and his racist followers that future Americans will embrace the Obamas as beloved figures while studying him as a stain on our history,” he wrote on X.
Trump has long had a bitter rivalry with Obama, who was president from 2009 to 2017, taking particular umbrage at the Democrat’s popularity and the fact that he won the Nobel peace prize.
In the first year of his second term in the White House, Trump has ramped up his use of realistic but fabricated AI visuals on Truth Social and other platforms, often glorifying himself while lampooning his critics.
He has used the provocative posts to rally his conservative base.
An AI-generated video in one of the posts, showing fighter jets dumping human waste on protesters, was created by the same X user who made the video showing the Obamas as monkeys.
Last year, Trump posted a video generated by artificial intelligence showing Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office and appearing behind bars in an orange jumpsuit.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has drawn criticism from his opponents for leading a crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.
US federal anti-discrimination programs were born of the 1960s civil rights struggle, mainly led by Black Americans, for equality and justice after hundreds of years of slavery, whose abolition in 1865 saw other institutional forms of racism enforced.
-Agence France-Presse