President Donald Trump went on a wild social media posting spree late Thursday night and into Friday morning, one that included a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
The clip of the Obamas, which appears to be AI-generated, comes near the end of a 62-second video about election conspiracy theories. Trump posted the video just before midnight on Thursday, and as of Friday morning it is still up on his Truth Social page.
The White House defended the post. “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in a statement. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
The video is the latest entry in the right’s long history of racism directed at the Obamas. Trump ahead of the 2012 presidential election famously pushed the “birther” conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was actually born in Africa and not a U.S. citizen. “An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud,” he tweeted that year. Obama had already released his long-form birth certificate to throw cold water on the conspiracy theory a year prior.
Democrats were quick to condemn the post depicting the Obamas as apes on Friday.
“Disgusting behavior by the President,” California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press office wrote shortly after Trump posted the clip. “Every single Republican must denounce this. Now.”
“Trump is a vile racist old man. The people in the @HouseGOP that don’t speak out on this, I’m going to assume you support this racism,” wrote Rep. Herb Conaway (D-N.J.), who is Black.
“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,” Ben Rhodes, a national security adviser under Obama, posted on X.
“Every Republican will pretend they didn’t see it, no reporter should let them get away with it,” wrote Dan Pfeiffer, another former Obama adviser.
Some on the right seemed to recognize that Trump posting the video was not a good look. “FAKE NEWS ALERT! Trump Didn’t post this monkey video of the obamas. Lying Democrats. It’s not on his page. Fake screenshot,” wrote MAGA influencer Terrence K. Williams to his 2.4 million X followers. Williams was quickly corrected by fact checkers and a community note was soon attached to his post, which has not been deleted as of Friday morning.
The video featuring the Obamas was part of a bizarre string of posts from the president, many of which promoted unfounded election conspiracy theories. Trump also shared a 14-second video of a dog sliding itself into a kitchen at the sound of an aerosol whipped cream can, and a 15-second video of Bruce Lee set to a dramatic rendition of the “Seven Nation Army” melody.
SACHA LECCA
SACHA LECCA
SACHA LECCA
SACHA LECCA
SACHA LECCA
Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.