admin 
Kinsey CrowleyMelina KhanUSA TODAY NETWORK
Updated Feb. 6, 2026, 6:44 p.m. ET
President Donald Trump’s social media account shared a clip of former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama’s faces transposed on a monkey-like illustration, a racist image rooted in eugenics and the Jim Crow era.
The roughly minute-long video posted on Truth Social late Feb. 5 and deleted about 12 hours later centers on footage discussing unsubstantiated voter fraud allegations in the 2020 presidential election before briefly flipping to the clip meant to portray the Obamas.
The apparently AI-generated scene showed the Obamas in a jungle setting with what appear to be gorilla bodies. It was cut from a longer doctored video of Democrats’ faces on various animals, and Trump’s face on a lion, calling him the “King of the Jungle.” Walking next to his lion body in the video is Pepe the Frog, a popular internet meme that was added to a hate symbol database during the 2016 election.
Many on social media, including some Republican lawmakers, denounced the portrayal as racist.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt initially dismissed the criticism and pointed to the King of the Jungle meme. The White House later deleted the video, blaming it on a staffer, an official previously told USA TODAY.
This deepfake video is the latest shared by the administration that has drawn criticism, after an artificial video of Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office (which never happened) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero.
But portraying Black people as any type of monkey or ape has a dark past. Here is what to know:
More: Trump posts fake AI-video showing Obama being arrested with ‘YMCA’ and meme turned hate symbol
Why is monkey imagery racist?
In short, it’s dehumanizing, but its use in America’s history of slavery and segregation makes it particularly problematic.
Associating Black people with primates has origins in eugenics arguments that Black people were biologically inferior or a lesser human. (Eugenics theories have been widely debunked and denounced, especially after being used as justification in the Holocaust).
The message was also disseminated through what would have been considered entertainment at the time. In 1906, for example, the Bronx zoo caged a Congolese man named Ota Benga in the primate house as an exhibit. The New York Times coverage at the time read, “it is probably a good thing that Benga doesn’t think very deeply,” and speculated that uncomfortable zoogoers may not understand his race was not highly rated among humans.
“The development of the cultural myth of Black subhumanity served as the justification for Jim Crow segregation and acts of vigilante justice against Blacks in the form of lynching in the U.S. South,” Gregory Parks and Danielle Heard wrote in a 2009 Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers publication about the dangers of racist jokes against Obama.
After the civil rights era, the monkey and gorilla imagery has continued to perpetuate stereotypes of Black people being brutish or beastly, they wrote.
This is not the first time the Obamas have been subjected to racist associations with primates. According to the Jim Crow Museum, in the 2008 presidential elections, Barack Obama was depicted as a monkey on multiple occasions. A small West Virginia town struck controversy with a Facebook post that called Michelle Obama an “ape in heels.” In 2009, a New York Post cartoon showed two cops shooting a chimpanzee with a conversation bubble, “they’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”
What did the Obamas say about the monkey video?
USA TODAY has reached out to the Obamas for comment
In the original “King of the Jungle” that the White House referred to, Trump’s head is superimposed on the body of a lion. Faces of other politicians, including Jeffries, former President Joe Biden, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and U.S. Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also appear superimposed on animals.
In an apparent response to the video, Jeffries posted on X, calling the Obamas “brilliant, compassionate and patriotic Americans.”
“Donald Trump is a vile, unhinged and malignant bottom feeder,” Jeffries’ post said. “Every single Republican must immediately denounce Donald Trump’s disgusting bigotry.”
Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, a usual Trump ally, also criticized the post before it was deleted.
“Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” Scott wrote on X, and called on the president to take it down.
Original:https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/02/06/donald-trump-racist-meme-obama-explained/88544923007/?tbref=hp
