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US President Donald Trump has sparked disagreements among Democrats over a repost on social media in which Barack and Michelle Obama are placed high above monkeys.
The video – which repeats a laundry list of unverified claims about the 2020 election, which Trump condemned – contains brief seconds of the former president and his wife, smiling at the bodies of animals. A hit of the 1960s The Lion Sleeps Tonightwith the lyrics “mighty jungle,” playing in the background.
“Disgusting behavior by the president. All Republicans must condemn this. Now,” wrote X’s account of the Gov’s press office. Gavin Newsom.
Ben Rhodes, who worked in the Obama White House, added: “It should worry Trump and his bigoted supporters that the Americans of tomorrow will accept the Obamas as lovable people while learning about him as a stain on our history.”
Since the beginning of his political career, Trump has said he knows nothing about the content when he retweets provocative messages written by others.
“I’m rewriting things and we’re starting a dialogue, and it’s very exciting,” he said in the 2016 campaign.
The frames showing the Obamas were taken from a long video, previously shared by an influential meme maker. It shows Trump as the “King of the Jungle” and shows a number of Democratic leaders as animals, including Joe Biden, who is white, as a monkey eating a banana.
White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt, commenting to the Associated Press, said: “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that is important to the American public.”
“This comes from an internet meme video that depicts President Trump as King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from King King,” Leavitt said in the text, referring to the 1994 Disney film.
Obama lied he says
Although Trump’s political commentary began in the late 1980s, when he began mocking the potential president, after joining Twitter in 2009, he began to focus on political issues, helping to popularize and spread the theory that Obama was not born in Hawaii, but rather, in Africa.
Even after publicly stating that he believed Obama was a natural-born American, Trump continued to play down the idea, pointing to “a lot of people” who believed the 44th president’s Hawaii birth certificate was fake.
He also falsely accused Obama of spying on his 2016 political campaign and helping to push the investigation into contacts between his campaign and Russian officials. No concrete evidence has emerged due to many reports and investigations that Obama during his presidency influenced the decisions of the Department of Justice and the FBI.
The Obamas have occasionally hit back at Trump’s claims or criticized the two-term Republican president, including late last month after two fatal shootings in Minneapolis by immigration officials.
“Instead of trying to impose discipline and accountability on the agents who used them, the president and current administration officials seem eager to escalate the situation, while providing public explanations for Mr. [Alex] “Pretti and Renee Good were not informed of any serious investigation — and that appears to directly contradict the video evidence,” the Obamas wrote.
Andrew Chang explains US President Donald Trump’s call for Republicans to make elections ‘national’ ahead of the upcoming midterms and how it contradicts the rationale given by his press secretary. Photos provided by The Canadian Press, Reuters and Getty Images
Michelle Obama did not attend Trump’s inauguration or Jimmy Carter’s funeral, both in January 2025, although she did not publicly cite him as the reason for her absence.
Regarding the 2020 election, Trump continues to insist that his loss to Joe Biden was a “trick” vote, but he never explained how the presidential race was ruined on a day when hundreds of federal, state and regional elections took place without major incident. The average voter on November 5, 2020, faced a ballot with several contests in it.
Both Trump’s former Attorney General William Barr and the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in his first administration have rejected allegations of widespread fraud that could change the final result, and they report, reviews and audits of the 2020 field districts all confirmed the victory of Biden.
But Trump’s recent comments about election collusion, as well as FBI raids related to the 2020 vote, have renewed fears among Democrats that his administration will once again create confusion and chaos in the mid-term and 2028 presidential elections.
