(Washington) The White House has pleaded “the error” of an “employee” after the broadcast of a racist video, now removed, showing Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys on Donald Trump’s personal account on Truth Social, the American president’s network.
Published at
Updated to
The edit remained online for around twelve hours.
The spokesperson for the 79-year-old Republican, Karoline Leavitt, initially denounced a “false indignation” and attacked the media which reported it, without mentioning an error.
But faced with the revolt sparked by these images of the first black president of the United States and his wife as primates, even within the Republican Party, the White House changed its response.
“A White House employee posted this content by mistake. It has been erased,” a senior executive official told AFP.
“It’s a good thing that this content was removed, it should never have been published and it does not represent the nation that we are,” responded Republican Senator Katie Britt on X.
The American presidency did not immediately respond to requests for details on this anonymous employee, nor on the management of Donald Trump’s personal account on Truth Social.
Fraud
This network serves as an official communication channel as well as an outlet for the American president. He reports on his exchanges with heads of state, but also uses it to attack his opponents or express himself on the most varied subjects, such as the rules of American football.
His personal account also broadcasts bursts of videos from various sources.
The now removed video, a little over a minute long, presents supposed evidence of manipulation of the 2020 vote, which the Republican president insists against all evidence of having won.
At the end, a montage of the Obama couple very quickly appears, their hilarious faces on a monkey’s body, the jungle as a backdrop.
“Donald Trump is a scavenger,” the leader of the Democratic minority in the American Congress, Hakeem Jeffries, reacted on X.
The Democratic governor of California, Gavin Newsom, potential presidential candidate in 2028, denounced “despicable behavior”.
“Most racist thing”
Indignation has spread to the conservative camp, where criticism of the American president is generally non-existent or very muted.
Conservative Senator Tim Scott, the only black Republican elected to the upper house of Congress, spoke on X of “the most racist thing I have seen come out of this White House”.
Mississippi Republican Senator Roger Wicker called the content “completely unacceptable.”
The montage was originally published by the American far-right website Patriot News Outlet, and republished twice by Donald Trump.
The White House initially followed its usual strategy, which consists of defending or amplifying the president’s messages.
“This is taken from a video posted on the internet depicting President Trump as king of the jungle, and Democrats as Lion King. Stop this false indignation and report on something that, today, means something to the American public,” declared the spokesperson for the American president, Karoline Leavitt, in a press release sent to AFP.
Animosity
The video Karoline Leavitt is referring to is a cartoon created by the pro-Trump account @xerias_x. We see several democratic figures, such as Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, represented as animals, with Donald Trump represented as a lion.
But the conspiratorial video on electoral fraud broadcast on the American president’s Truth Social account only includes one very short extract from this cartoon, the one which shows the Obamas as primates.
Donald Trump has a particular animosity against the first black president of the United States, a very popular figure with Americans.
He only calls him “Barack Hussein Obama,” using his middle name, and has helped spread conspiracy theories around the Democrat’s nationality.
During his campaign, the Republican leader increased his violent statements against immigrants and spread false information with racist overtones.
