Photos: YouTube Screenshots
On Thursday, during his latest late-night online posting spree, President Donald Trump took to his social-media site to promote an apparently AI-generated video clip depicting former first couple Barack and Michelle Obama as apes in a jungle. The short video otherwise touches on Trump’s anti-democratic lies about the 2020 election that he tried to steal.
The image that the nominal leader of the free world blasted out online is unambiguously racist. It does not get much more textbook-example racist than gleefully depicting two Black people – one of whom is a former US president who Trump routinely says he wants to jail for fake reasons – as apes or monkeys. The Trump White House is at least pretending that they do not see it that way.
“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from ‘The Lion King,’” Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
But the roughly minute-long video, which as of writing this is still up on Trump’s Truth Social account, does not feature those other parts of the meme video, which features Trump as a lion character. It just suddenly inserts near the end a clip of the Obamas as apes, after a human regurgitates provably false claims about Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in 2020.
The video clip, which some commentators and politicians may want to wave off as a mere distraction, actually succinctly combines two of the top policy priorities of the Trump-Vance administration: codifying his election denialism and election-rigging efforts into government policy, and institutionalizing blatant racism.
This trash is just one of the many deranged social media posts that Trump shared Thursday.
As The New Republic notes, on Thursday, President Trump also “shared a video of a dog being summoned by a can of whipped cream, and another clip of Bruce Lee from ‘Enter the Dragon’ (1973).” This is all coming from a president who gets incredibly mad at the media for reporting on his obvious physical and mental decline.
But Trump’s most recent racist outburst on social media cannot, in fact, be solely pinned on one raving madman. According to sources intimately familiar with the matter, video and photo posts to the president’s Truth Social account go through layers of approval. Trump signs off on the content posted, but he often does not find, and certainly does not clip or upload, these clips himself. He is often presented with a menu of options by senior aides for approval, and the footage or images are reviewed by advisers, such as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino.
After all, it takes a village – or, jungle – to create the federal government’s racist propaganda operation
