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.
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”