President Donald Trump has said he will not apologise for sharing a social media post that included racist imagery portraying former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as cartoon apes, despite widespread bipartisan condemnation.
The post, which was removed late Thursday, featured a roughly one-minute video that largely promoted false claims of fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Toward the end of the clip, the video abruptly transitioned to edited images of the Obamas superimposed on apes, accompanied by the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by The Tokens.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday, Trump said he had only watched the beginning of the video before it was shared.
“I looked at the beginning of it. It was fine,” Trump said. “I looked in the first part and it was really about voter fraud and the machines, how crooked it is, how disgusting it is.
Then I gave it to the people. Generally, they’d look at the whole thing. But I guess somebody didn’t, and they posted.”
He added that the video was taken down once the offensive content was discovered.
“We took it down as soon as we found out about it,” he said.
A White House official told NBC News that the post was shared in error by a staff member and was removed shortly before noon on Friday.
While Trump said he condemned the racist imagery, he insisted that he had not made a mistake and would not apologise.
“Of course” he condemns the racist content, Trump said, adding, “No, I didn’t make a mistake.”
The incident sparked immediate backlash from lawmakers across party lines.
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Senate’s only Black Republican, described the post as “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House” and called for its immediate removal.
Trump later said he had spoken with Scott and claimed the senator “understood that 100%.”
Several other Republican lawmakers publicly criticised the post. Senator Pete Ricketts of Nebraska said that regardless of intent, the racist context was clear and that the White House should remove the content and issue an apology.
Representative Mike Lawler of New York described the video as “wrong and incredibly offensive,” urging that it be deleted with an apology.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt initially defended the video, characterising it as an internet meme portraying Trump as the “King of the Jungle” and Democrats as characters from The Lion King, while urging the media to “stop the fake outrage.”
However, criticism intensified after the imagery circulated, particularly as the incident occurred during Black History Month.
Additional lawmakers continued to press for an apology even after the video was removed.
Representative Mike Turner of Ohio called the imagery “offensive, heartbreaking, and unacceptable,” while Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania described it as “a grave failure of judgment” unfit for anyone, especially the president.
Senator John Curtis of Utah criticised the delay in removing the post, calling it “blatantly racist and inexcusable.”
The controversy follows previous instances in which Trump has shared manipulated or AI-generated content targeting political opponents.
It also comes amid renewed attention on his repeated claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, alongside recent federal activity related to voter records in Georgia.
