WASHINGTON – US President Donald Trump on Feb 5 posted an election conspiracy video that depicted former president Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, as monkeys, drawing condemnation from prominent Democrats.
Near the end of a one-minute-long video posted on Mr Trump’s Truth Social platform, the Obamas are shown with their faces on monkeys for about one second.
The song The Lion Sleeps Tonight plays in the background when the Obamas appear.
The video repeats false allegations that ballot-counting company Dominion Voting Systems helped steal the 2020 election from Mr Trump.
As at early morning of Feb 6, the video had been liked more than 1,000 times on the President’s social media network.
The office of California Governor Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate and a prominent Trump critic, slammed the post.
“Disgusting behaviour by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this. Now,” Mr Newsom’s press office account posted on X.
Mr Ben Rhodes, a former top national security advisor and close confidant to Mr Barack Obama, also condemned the imagery.
“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 also wrote on X.
Mr Obama is the only black president in US history and backed Mr Trump’s opponent, Ms Kamala Harris, on the campaign trail in the 2024 presidential election.
In the first year of his second term in the White House, Mr Trump ramped up his use of hyper-realistic but fabricated visuals on Truth Social and other platforms, often glorifying himself while lampooning his critics.
He has used the provocative posts to rally his conservative base.
In 2025, he posted an AI video of Mr Obama being arrested in the Oval Office and appearing behind bars in an orange jumpsuit.
Later, he posted an AI clip of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries – who is black – wearing a fake moustache and a sombrero.
Mr Jeffries called the image racist.
Since returning to the White House, Mr Trump has drawn criticism from his opponents for leading a crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes.
One of Mr Trump’s first acts was to terminate all federal government DEI programmes, including related policies in the military.
The drive to rid the armed forces of what Mr Trump has derided as “woke” initiatives has also seen the removal from some military academy bookshelves of scores of books that cover the US’ history of discrimination.
US federal anti-discrimination programmes were born of the 1960s civil rights struggle, mainly led by black Americans, for equality and justice after hundreds of years of slavery, whose abolition in 1865 saw other institutional forms of racism enforced. AFP
