(Washington) Former US President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle are depicted as monkeys in a conspiracy video montage, released Thursday evening by President Donald Trump, and dedicated to the 2020 presidential election.
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The video, a little over a minute long, presents supposed evidence of manipulation during the vote on his Truth Social network, which the Republican president claims to have won. He claims to have been robbed of victory by Democrat Joe Biden.
The montage was originally posted by the American far-right website Patriot News Outlet, and republished twice by Donald Trump.
It repeats allegations, which have never been proven, that the counting company Dominion Voting Systems helped steal the vote from Donald Trump in a number of key states.
Just before the end of the publication, for two seconds, a video montage of the Obama couple appears, their hilarious faces on a primate body, the jungle in the background.
As of Friday morning, the video had already received several thousand likes on Truth Social.
The office of California Governor Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential candidate and one of the current administration’s fiercest critics, blasted the publication.
“Despicable behavior from the president. Every Republican must speak out against this. Now,” published the account of its press service on X, with a freeze of the part of the video showing the Obama couple in primate bodies.
Ben Rhodes, former senior national security adviser and close to Barack Obama, also protested.
“May it haunt Trump and his racist supporters, knowing that Americans of tomorrow will cherish the Obamas as beloved figures, while studying Trump as a stain on our history,” he also wrote on X.
“Somalia, “rotten country””
During the first year of his second term in the White House, Trump intensified his use of hyper-realistic, but fabricated, visuals on Truth Social and other platforms to glorify himself or ridicule his detractors.
Mr. Trump makes no secret of his animosity for Mr. Obama. Last year, he published an AI-generated video showing Barack Obama, the first black president in US history, arrested in the Oval Office and then appearing behind bars in an orange prison jumpsuit.
Later, he posted a clip of House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries – also black – wearing a fake mustache and sombrero. The parliamentarian denounced a racist message.
The Trump administration is waging an open fight against initiatives it says are linked to woke ideology, a term used pejoratively by conservatives to denounce what they perceive as an excess of activism in favor of minorities.
The head of state is on a crusade against illegal immigration and regularly denigrates minorities, playing on the fears of a segment of his white electorate of losing their political and cultural power.
His administration also regularly pays tribute to the Confederate States of America, defenders of slavery who fell during the Civil War (1861-1865).
Abroad, Donald Trump has also made South Africa one of his favorite targets, denouncing racial discrimination which, according to him, targets the white minority descended from the first European settlers. The American president says that white farmers are victims of a “genocide”.
Nationals of sub-Saharan African countries are also regularly annoyed by his comments.
In Somalia, “they have nothing, they only kill each other,” he said in December. “Their country is worthless for one reason or another. Their country is rotten and we don’t want them here.”
