Right-wing influencer Ben Shapiro insisted that President Donald Trump did not have the "attention span" to realize that a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes had been posted on his Truth Social account.

Media Matters first reported that Shapiro had addressed Trump's racist meme on his Friday show.

"There's a video that he posted over at Truth Social that apparently contains an image of the Obamas as apes," the MAGA star noted. "Do I think that President Trump even watched the whole video? I have serious doubts. President Trump has a habit of late-night Truthing, where he just sort of gets up at 3 AM, or he's up at 3 AM, and he just starts Truthing things out."

"And I'm almost certain that the president never watches the entirety of any video," he continued. "I don't think he has the attention span to get through any of the videos that he has tweeted. I think he sees that there is something that is pro-Trump, he puts it out there. And if there's an ugly image in there, either he ignores it or he didn't see it in the first place as a general rule."

"Now, does that justify it? It doesn't justify anything, but I think that the suggestion that the president did not watch the entirety of the video and that he just put that out late at night because he watched the first 25 seconds of the video or 40 seconds of the video, I would say that that is extremely high probability."

A new lawsuit alleges that President Donald Trump's Federal Trade Commission is trying to run a media ratings company out of business in retaliation for it giving poor marks to outlets that support the Republican Party.

According to The Washington Post, NewsGuard, founded in 2018 by two former media executives, "researches news sites and assigns them 'reliability ratings' based on their journalistic standards, selling these scores to readers, tech platforms and advertisers that want to steer clear of low-quality sources. The company, which insists it is rigorously nonpartisan, has made enemies in recent years by giving low ratings to conservative outlets such as the right-wing cable news channels Newsmax and One America News."

In their lawsuit, NewsGuard alleges that the FTC has undertaken multiple moves designed to crush the company's business as an act of political revenge.

"Last May, Trump’s FTC launched an investigation of NewsGuard, ordering the company to hand over the names of all its clients, virtually every document and communication it has ever produced related to its news ratings, and all of its financial reports since the time of its founding, the company alleges," said the report. "Then, before approving a $13 billion merger that created the world’s largest ad agency, the FTC included an order that effectively blocks the newly formed goliath from ever doing business with companies like NewsGuard."

These measures, the lawsuit said, are a violation of the First and Fourth Amendments comparable to “the witch hunts of the McCarthy era,” and a reflection of right-wing FTC chair Andrew Ferguson's crusade to “brazenly [use] its power not for any issue concerning trade or commerce, but rather to censor speech.”

This comes after federal courts sharply rebuked the FTC last year for an investigation into the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America, allegedly for colluding with advertisers to block tech billionaire Elon Musk's X platform from receiving ad revenue. Media Matters had triggered several advertiser withdrawals from the site by revealing to the public how frequently the ads were being displayed next to antisemitic and neo-Nazi content.