US President Donald Trump has drawn sharp criticism from Democrats after sharing a video on social media that portrayed former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as monkeys, a move widely condemned as racist and inflammatory.
The one-minute video, posted on Trump’s Truth Social platform on Thursday, briefly shows the Obamas’ faces superimposed on the bodies of monkeys near the end of the clip, accompanied by the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight. The imagery appears for about one second but quickly triggered outrage from political opponents.
The video also repeats false claims that Dominion Voting Systems helped rig the 2020 presidential election against Trump, allegations that have been repeatedly debunked and rejected by courts.
By early Friday, the post had received several thousand likes on Truth Social.
California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office strongly condemned the video, calling it “disgusting behavior” and urging Republicans to publicly denounce the post. The message was shared on X by Newsom’s press office.
Ben Rhodes, a former senior national security adviser to Barack Obama, also criticised the video, saying it reflected racism and warning that history would judge Trump harshly while the Obamas would be remembered positively.
Barack Obama, the first and only Black president in US history, actively campaigned for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential election, which Trump won to secure a second term in office.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has increasingly shared hyper-realistic but fabricated visuals on social media, often glorifying himself while mocking political opponents. The posts have been used to energise his conservative base.
Last year, Trump shared an artificial-intelligence-generated video depicting Obama being arrested in the Oval Office and later posted another AI-generated image of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wearing a sombrero and fake mustache. Jeffries described the image as racist.
Trump’s latest post comes amid broader criticism over his administration’s stance on diversity, equity and inclusion programmes. One of his first actions in office was to terminate all federal DEI initiatives, including policies within the US military.
The push to remove what Trump has described as “woke” policies has also led to the withdrawal of books on discrimination and racial history from some US military academies.
Federal anti-discrimination policies in the United States were largely shaped by the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which emerged after centuries of slavery and institutionalised racism following its abolition in 1865.
