Trump shares election conspiracy social media video with racist depiction of Obamas

U.S. President Donald Trump is sparking backlash from Democrats over a late-night social media repost in which Barack and Michelle Obama are superimposed atop the bodies of apes.

The video — which repeated a laundry list of debunked claims concerning the 2020 election, which Trump lost — contains a few brief seconds of the former president and his wife, smiling on the animal bodies. The 1960s hit The Lion Sleeps Tonight, with its lyrics of the “mighty jungle,” plays in the background.

“Disgusting behaviour by the president. Every single Republican must denounce this. Now,” the X account of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office posted.

Ben Rhodes, who worked in the Obama White House, added: “Let it haunt Trump and his racist followers that future Americans will embrace the Obamas as beloved figures while studying him as a stain on our history.”

From the beginning of his political career, Trump has claimed ignorance about content when reposting inflammatory messages authored by others.

“I retweet things and we start dialogue, and it’s very interesting,” he said on the 2016 campaign trail.

False Obama claims

Although Trump’s political commentary dates back to the late 1980s, when he first teased a potential presidential run, after he joined Twitter in 2009, he began to frequently weigh in on political issues, helping to reignite and popularize a fringe theory that Obama had not been born in Hawaii, but rather, in Africa.

Even after publicly stating that he believed Obama was America-born, Trump continued to play footsy with the idea, pointing to the “many people” who believed the 44th president’s Hawaii birth certificate was not authentic.

He also falsely accused Obama of spying on his 2016 political campaign and helping to spearhead the investigation into contacts between his campaign and Russian officials. No credible evidence has emerged stemming from numerous reports and investigations that Obama when president had any influence over the decisions of the Justice Department and FBI.

The Obamas have occasionally pushed back on Trump’s claims or criticized the two-time Republican president, including late last month after two fatal shootings in Minneapolis committed by federal immigration officers.

“Rather than trying to impose some semblance of discipline and accountability over the agents they’ve deployed, the president and current administration officials seem eager to escalate the situation, while offering public explanations for the shootings of Mr. [Alex] Pretti and Renee Good that aren’t informed by any serious investigation — and that appear to be directly contradicted by video evidence,” the Obamas wrote.

Michelle Obama did not attend Trump’s inauguration or Jimmy Carter’s funeral, both in January 2025, although she has not publicly cited him as the reason for her absence.

With respect to the 2020 election, Trump continues to insist that his loss to Joe Biden was a “rigged” vote, but has never explained how the presidential contest alone was corrupted on a day where hundreds of other federal, state and county elections took place without major incident. A typical voter on Nov. 5, 2020, was confronted with a ballot with several contests on it.

Both Trump’s former attorney general William Barr and the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in his first administration rejected his claims of widespread fraud that could change the ultimate outcome, and recounts, reviews and audits in the battleground states of 2020 all affirmed Biden’s victory.

But recent Trump comments about federalizing elections, and an FBI raid ostensibly related to the 2020 vote, have renewed fears among Democrats that his administration will again stir up confusion and chaos in this year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential election.