President Donald Trump sparked fury Friday morning after posting a blatantly racist video on social media depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as non-human primates, a post critics denounced as a shocking new low for the presidency.
“Disgusting behavior by the President,” wrote California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office Friday in a social media post on X. “Every single Republican must denounce this. Now.”
Posted late Thursday night to his social media platform Truth Social, the social media post in question is a roughly one-minute video supporting the president’s false claims that the 2020 election was “rigged.” At the end of the video, a short, two-second clip is seen in which the Obamas’ faces are superimposed onto the bodies of primates in the jungle, set to the 1961 song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by The Tokens.
The video also bears a watermark suggesting it was created by X user “Xerias,” a pro-Trump account with more than 45,000 followers who on X early Friday claimed credit for having made the video last October.
“Trump just posted an incredibly racist photo of the Obamas’ faces photoshopped onto the body of apes,” wrote Dean Withers, a political commentator on X with nearly 500,000 followers. “Every day is a new rock bottom for this ugly pig.”
Some critics, like journalist Wajahat Ali, took Trump’s latest post as indisputable evidence of both Trump’s and the Republican Party’s racism, arguing that in posting the video, and the GOP’s silence, both were “showing their true colors.” Others, like liberal political commentator Brian Krassenstein, were simply left baffled.
“Our RACIST President just posted a video which depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as Apes,” Krassenstein wrote early Friday morning in a social media post on X.
“But I’m sure MAGA will tell us it’s the black people who are the real racist ones. When is enough enough? When can you all admit that you voted for a terrible human being?”
This is astoundingly bad. I hope that Stephen Miller has hijacked the president’s social media but I suspect this is Donald himself.
Isn’t this evidence that he is mentally deranged and should step down from office? https://t.co/CRFUvgD6wb
— Fighting Sullivan (@fightingsully) February 6, 2026