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Trump post depicting Obamas as monkeys 'taken down,' White House official says
A video posted by U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday showing Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys was no longer available online as of noon on Friday.
The one-minute video shared on Truth Social promoted Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. At the end of the video, a short clip shows former U.S. president and former first lady as monkeys with the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight playing in the background.
The video was no longer available online as of noon on Friday. “A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down,” a White House official said in a statement.
Prior to the video being unavailable, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement over text to the Associated Press that the clip was taken from “an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King.” The animated Disney movie was released in 1994.
“Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public,” Leavitt said in her statement.
The clip had a watermark from a pro-Trump social media account called @xerias_x, which posts trending memes. On X, the account has 46,000 followers.
The backlash to the video came from the Democrats but also a Trump ally, U.S. Senator from South Carolina Tim Scott.
Scott said on X that he was “praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”
The racist trope of depicting Black people as monkeys or apes has a long history in the United States.
He said Trump should take down the video. Scott is the only Black Republican senator and is a Trump ally, according to The Hill .
The office of California Governor Gavin Newsom called on Republicans to “denounce this now” in a post on X . He said it was “disgusting” behaviour by the president.
Ben Rhodes is a former deputy national security advisor for strategic communications and speechwriting under President Barack Obama.
“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 .
The meme account @xerias_x shared the original video, which featured the Obamas, online on Oct. 24, 2025. It is captioned “President Trump: King of the Jungle.” It shows a wide range of politicians as animals from the jungle, including Trump as a lion, Hilary Clinton as a warthog, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a donkey and Joe Biden as a baboon.
Since regaining office for a second term, Trump has tried to argue he did not lose the 2020 election. However, as the New York Times reported , several lawsuits with the goal of overturning the results were dismissed in 2020 and 2021.
Trump’s attorney general, William P. Barr, who resigned in December 2020 , said that same month in an interview with the Associated Press that the U.S. Department of Justice found no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could have changed the results of that election.
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