US President Donald Trump has said he “didn’t see” the part of a social media video which showed a racist clip depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
The clip – set to the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight – was at the end of a 62-second video he shared containing claims about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. The video was later removed.
Speaking to reporters on Friday, Trump said “I didn’t make a mistake” when asked whether he was going to apologise.
He added he had only seen the beginning of the video before it was posted by a staff member and didn’t know it contained that depiction of the Obamas.
Republican Senator Tim Scott – who is black – described it as “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House”.
Some criticism came from within Trump’s own party.
Senator Scott, a South Carolina Republican and an ally of Trump, posted that he was “praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House”.
“The President should remove it,” he added.
Another Republican, New York representative Mike Lawler, called the post “wrong and incredibly offensive – whether intentional or a mistake” and said it “should be deleted immediately with an apology offered.”
The criticism continued even after the post was taken down.
John Curtis, a Republican Senator from Utah, posted on social media that the video was “blatantly racist and inexcusable”.
“It should never have been posted or left published for so long,” he wrote.
According to CBS, the BBC’s US partner, Florida representative Byron Donalds – a longtime supporter of Trump’s who is running for governor – called the White House after the video was posted and was told that it was the work of a staffer who “let the president down”.
The BBC has contacted the White House for clarification on how many people have access to the president’s account and what the approval process is for posts.
In a statement sent to the BBC earlier in the day, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the clip is from “an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King”.
“Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public,” she added.
Before it was removed, Derrick Johnson, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, called the video “disgusting and utterly despicable” and accused Trump of attempting to distract the public from the Epstein case and a “rapidly failing economy.”
Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications in the Obama White House, said: “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 country.”
In a short post of his own, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said that “Donald Trump is a racist”.
“Disgusting behaviour by the president,” the office of California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote on X. “Every single Republican must denounce this. Now.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries – who himself accused Trump of racism last year after he shared an AI-image depicting Jeffries with a moustache and sombrero – responded to the recent video by calling Trump a “vile, unhinged and malignant bottom feeder”.
“Every single Republican must immediately denounce Donald Trump’s disgusting bigotry,” he added.
The clip of the Obamas was added to the end of a minute-long video which included claims about a voting conspiracy in Michigan in the 2020 presidential election. Those claims were debunked as part of Dominion Voting System’s successful civil legal actions against some media companies.
Trump also has a long history of criticising and attacking Obama.
Before his first term as president, Trump regularly made false claims that the Hawaii-born Obama was actually born in Kenya and therefore was ineligible to be president.
He later acknowledged that Obama was born in the US.
