President Trump's racist social media post featuring former President Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, as primates in a jungle was deleted Friday after bipartisan backlash calling the video offensive. However, Trump said later Friday he won't apologize for the post. "I didn't make a mistake," he said, answering questions from reporters accompanying him Friday night aboard Air Force One, per the AP. Trump said the video was about fraudulent elections. "I liked the beginning. I saw it and just passed it on, and I guess probably nobody reviewed the end of it," he said. Asked if he condemned the video's racism, Trump said, "Of course I do."
The GOP president's Thursday night post was eventually blamed on a staffer after widespread backlash calling for its removal, from civil rights leaders to veteran Republican senators, for its treatment of the nation's first Black president and first lady. A rare White House admission of a misstep, the deletion came hours after press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed "fake outrage" over the post and said it'd been a Lion King meme (with no initial mention of a staffer being responsible). Trump has a record of intensely personal criticism of the Obamas and of using incendiary, sometimes racist, rhetoric—from feeding the lie that Obama wasn't a native-born US citizen to crude generalizations about majority-Black nations.
The post came in the first week of Black History Month and days after a Trump proclamation cited "the contributions of black Americans to our national greatness." An Obama spokeswoman said the former president, a Democrat, had no response. Nearly all of the 62-second clip appears to be from a conservative video alleging deliberate tampering with voting machines in battleground states as 2020 votes were tallied. At the 60-second mark is a quick scene of two jungle primates, with the Obamas' smiling faces imposed on them. Those frames originated from a separate video, previously circulated by an influential conservative meme maker, that shows Trump as "King of the Jungle" and depicts Democratic leaders as animals, including Joe Biden, who's white, as a jungle primate eating a banana.
Meanwhile, the Lion King, the Disney 1994 feature film that Leavitt referenced, is set on the savannah, not in the jungle, and it doesn't include great apes. The White House explanation also raises questions about control of Trump's social media account. The president often signs his name or initials after policy posts. The White House didn't immediately respond to an inquiry about how posts are vetted and when the public can know when Trump himself is posting. More here on further backlash.
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