Did Donald Trump share a post with the Obama depicted as apes?
Executive summary
President Donald Trump did share a post on his Truth Social account that contained a brief clip depicting former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama with ape/monkey imagery; the footage appears at the end of a roughly one-minute video pushing election-conspiracy claims and drew immediate widespread condemnation [1][2].
1. What was posted and where it appeared
Late on the night in question, Trump’s Truth Social feed included a 62‑second clip about alleged tampering with voting machines in the 2020 election; near the end of that clip—around the 60‑second mark—a one‑to‑two‑second scene shows two primates with the Obamas’ faces superimposed and set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” a segment that several major outlets documented after Trump shared the video [3][1][4].
2. The provenance of the image and the watermark
The frames of the Obamas were not novel to that moment: outlets reported the ape images carried an “@XERIAS_X” watermark and match a shorter internet meme video posted earlier by a Trump‑supporting X account, which appears to be the source of the clip Trump reposted [3][5][6].
3. Official response from the White House
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the share by calling it “from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King,” urging critics to stop what she called “fake outrage,” a characterization she repeated in statements to multiple outlets [5][6].
4. Public reaction and political pushback
News organizations and a cross‑section of public figures condemned the post as racist and disgusting, noting historical use of primate imagery to dehumanize Black people and highlighting the political context of the Obamas as the nation’s first Black presidential family [7][8][9]. Elected officials and commentators called for denouncements from Republican leaders, while others framed the share as part of a broader pattern of incendiary social‑media conduct by the president [6][10].
5. Context: the clip’s content and timing matter
Reporting uniformly places the ape imagery inside a longer clip promoting unfounded election‑fraud theories rather than as the video’s primary subject, and multiple outlets note the briefness of the sequence—about one to two seconds—though they also emphasize that brevity does not negate the racist impact of the image [3][1][5].
6. What the record confirms and what it does not
Contemporary reporting confirms that Trump shared the specific video containing the Obamas-as-apes clip on Truth Social and that the clip was traceable to a meme posted by @XERIAS_X [3][5]. Reporting does not establish, in the sources collected here, whether Trump personally edited the clip, whether he watched the full video before posting, or his subjective intent beyond the White House characterization; outlets explicitly note those uncertainties [3][6].
7. Why the episode matters beyond a single post
Journalists and commentators situate the episode within a larger pattern—Trump’s long history of amplifying conspiracies and, critics say, racially inflammatory content—and argue that presidential amplification normalizes messages that historical context shows can perpetuate dehumanizing tropes [8][9]. The White House’s framing of the post as a reused meme underscores the tension between platform reposting and responsibility that defined the immediate political debate [5][11].