White House deletes racist post about Obamas after backlash

President Donald Trump’s racist social media post featuring former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, as primates in a jungle was deleted Friday after a backlash from both Republicans and Democrats who criticized the video as offensive.

- by Bill Barrow and Josh Boak Associated Press

Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama attending Barack Obama Campaign Rally for Democratic Presidential Primary with Oprah Winfrey, The Verizon Wireless Arena, Manchester, December 09, 2007

(Everett Collection)

Trump said later Friday that he won’t apologize for the post: “I didn’t make a mistake,” he said.

The Republican President's Thursday night post was blamed on a staffer after widespread backlash, from civil rights leaders to veteran Republican senators, for its treatment of the nation’s first Black President and first lady. A rare White House admission of a misstep, the deletion came hours after press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed “fake outrage” over the post. After calls for its removal — including from Republicans — the White House said a staffer had posted the video in error.

The post was part of a flurry of overnight activity on Trump’s Truth Social account that amplified his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, despite courts around the country and Trump’s first-term attorney general finding no evidence of systemic fraud.

Trump has a record of intensely personal criticism of the Obamas and of using incendiary, sometimes racist, rhetoric — from feeding the lie that Obama was not a native-born U.S. citizen to crude generalizations about majority-Black countries.

The post came in the first week of Black History Month and days after a Trump proclamation cited “the contributions of black Americans to our national greatness” and “the American principles of liberty, justice, and equality.”

An Obama spokeswoman said the former President, a Democrat, had no response.

'An internet meme'