Trump defends racist Obama video as 'very strong' documentation of key campaign claim

Donald Trump has excused the sharing of a racist video featuring Barack and Michelle Obama to his Truth Social account as it actually details voter fraud.

The president has erroneously claimed for years that the 2020 elections were rigged. His second term in the White House has led to some pressure on mail-in ballots and the repetition of claims that the Democratic Party did not win the 2020 election. Trump's post to Truth Social last week was criticized by politicians, though the president has tried to explain why the video had been shared, The Daily Beast reported.

He told reporters on Thursday, "That was a video on, as you know, on voter fraud. It was a fairly long video, and they had a little piece and it had to do with the Lion King. It’s doing very well, uh, it’s been shown all over the place, long before that was posted.

"But that was a very strong - and I’m sure you saw it - a very strong piece on voter fraud, and the piece we were talking about was all over the place, many times I believe, for years."

The video was shared to Trump's Truth Social account at around midnight on February 6, with the current president sharing a host of posts, including this video. Said video runs for one minute and two seconds, with the final seconds of the video depicting Barack and Michelle as animals.

Trump had previously targeted Obama with an artificially generated video of the former president being arrested in the Oval Office. The deepfake video appeared in July last year on the president's Truth Social account.

Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) suggested that President Donald Trump had made a "mistake" by posting a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, but acknowledge that it was racist.

"Even if this was a Lion King meme, a reasonable person sees the racist context to this," Ricketts wrote Friday on X. "The White House should do what anyone does when they make a mistake: remove this and apologize."