Trump’s racist post about Obama deleted
President Donald Trump’s racist social media post featuring former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, as primates in a jungle was deleted after a backlash from both Republicans and Democrats who criticised the video as offensive. Trump said later Friday that he won’t apologise for the post: “I didn’t make a mistake,” he said.
The Republican president’s Thursday night post was blamed on a staffer after widespread backlash, from civil rights leaders to veteran Republican senators, for its treatment of the nation’s first Black president and first lady. A rare admission of a misstep by the White House, the deletion on Friday came hours after press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed “fake outrage” over the post.
After calls for its removal - including by Republicans — the White House said a staffer had posted the video erroneously. The post was part of a flurry of overnight activity on Trump’s Truth Social account that amplified his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, despite courts around the country and Trump’s first-term attorney general finding no evidence of systemic fraud.
Trump has a record of intensely personal criticism of the Obamas and of using incendiary, sometimes racist, rhetoric - from feeding the lie that Obama was not a native-born US citizen to crude generalisations about majority-Black countries.
The post came in the first week of Black History Month and days after a Trump proclamation cited “the contributions of black Americans to our national greatness” and “the American principles of liberty, justice, and equality”. An Obama spokeswoman said the former president, a Democrat, had no response.
