US President Donald Trump has once again shared his claims of election fraud in the 2020 election, and then crossed a far darker line by sharing a video on his Truth Social platform that depicts former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as monkeys.
The one-minute, two seconds clip, shared by Trump on Friday morning (India time), revives his long-running claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him, particularly in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.
Near the end of the video, the post veers from election conspiracy – of manipulated electronic vote counting machines and allegations – into racist imagery, flashing an AI-generated image of Barack Obama’s faces superimposed on monkey’s body, accompanied by the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
A similar depiction of Michelle Obama appears as well.
Trump has never accepted his defeat in the 2020 election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
Biden defeated Trump, winning 306 Electoral College votes and 51.3 per cent of the popular vote to Trump’s 232 electoral votes and 46.8 per cent of the popular vote.
Trump became the first sitting US President to lose re-election since George H. W. Bush in 1992.
Even before Election Day, Trump had insisted that he could only lose if the vote was “rigged.”
Since his defeat, he has spent nearly every day claiming his warnings of fraud had come true, despite repeated findings by courts, state officials and election administrators that there was no evidence of voter manipulation capable of changing the outcome.
Even recently, in an interview with The New York Times, Trump said that he regrets not getting the US National Guard to seize voting machines after his 2020 election defeat ended his first presidency.
The video Trump shared Thursday followed that familiar pattern for most of its runtime.
It includes charts, headlines and claims questioning Biden’s win in Pennsylvania, a state Trump narrowly lost.
But at the 59-second mark, the AI-generated image of Obama’s face appears.
Many read the imagery as a trope long associated with racist caricatures of Black people.
California governor Gavin Newsom, through his press office, said, “Disgusting behaviour by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this. Now.”
Other criticism flooded social media platforms within minutes of the post going live.
“Trump just posted an incredibly racist photo of Obama's faces photoshopped onto the body of apes. Every day is a new rock bottom for this ugly pig,” one user wrote on X.
Another added, “Donald Trump, the most openly racist President since slavery was abolished, just shared a video of Michelle & Barack Obama as APES. This is what the Republican party is now.”
Trump has offered no clarification or apology in the hours after the post circulated, allowing it to remain visible on his Truth Social account.
