The Obama Meme on Trump’s Truth Social Was Exactly What It Looked Like
AI Summary4 min read
TL;DR
Trump's Truth Social account posted a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, which remained up for 12 hours before removal. The White House initially defended it as a meme but later claimed an employee error, while the video sparked racist memecoins and highlighted historical dehumanization of Black people.
Key Takeaways
•Trump's Truth Social account shared a video showing the Obamas as apes, which was removed after 12 hours with the White House blaming an employee error.
•The video triggered the creation of a memecoin ($APEBAMA) that saw over $4 million in trading and widespread racist responses on social media.
•The ape imagery has deep historical roots in racist propaganda used to dehumanize Black people, from colonial times to modern incidents.
•The White House initially defended the video as a 'Lion King' meme despite its clear racist connotations, raising questions about accountability.
•The incident aligns with Trump's history of racist rhetoric and policies targeting African immigrants and communities.
The White House took 12 hours to remove a video depicting the former president and his wife as apes. Kevin Deitsch / Getty Donald Trump supercharged his political career by claiming that Barack Obama wasn’t American. Yesterday, 16 minutes before midnight, the president’s account on Truth Social posted a video that suggests Obama isn’t even human. It briefly shows the head of the first Black president and that of his wife superimposed onto the bodies of apes. They dance along to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
The video, which Trump’s account shared twice, seems to be a screen recording. Its first minute shows a clip promoting the lie that voting-machine tampering handed Joe Biden the presidency in 2020. Then, someone seems to swipe up, and the clip depicting the Obamas as apes flashes into focus.
The clip is on the screen for only a moment before the recording returns to the voting-machine video. And just before noon today, both posts of the video were removed from the president’s Truth Social account. (When I asked why, a White House official who declined to provide their name claimed that an unnamed employee “erroneously made the post.”)
In the interim, hundreds if not thousands of people responded to the clip with enthusiasm. Immediately after the video was first posted on Truth Social, the memecoin $APEBAMA was minted. Within 12 hours, more than $4 million worth of $APEBAMA had been traded back and forth. In an X group with the same name that now has hundreds of members, the pinned tweet implies that the meme stock will succeed because of how outrageous the video is: “this is pretty much on par with him calling Obama a nigga.” Some members posted their own depictions of Obama as a monkey or ape. The ape video’s apparent creator, the X user @xerias_x, reposted the full video to their X account early this morning. Besides the Obamas, the video shows a menagerie of Democratic politicians as animals, bowing down to Trump, who appears as a lion. It now has more than 1 million views. (@xerias_x also seems to be the originator of an AI-generated video Trump reposted in October that shows the president raining down what appears to be excrement on protesters from the sky.)
The “joke” that Trump’s account spread is plainly sinister. The idea that Black people sit somewhere between white people and apes has long been used to justify cruelty. In 1377, a historian wrote that Africans “have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals,” meaning they “are, as a whole, submissive to slavery.” Cartoons circulated during the Civil War were printed with images similar to the one Trump posted: One labels a monkey holding a book upside down as a NEGRO-MAN; another depicts a Black man on all fours, accompanied by the words WHAR’S JEFF DAVIS. In 1906, a man born in what was then the Belgian Congo, Ota Benga, was displayed at the Bronx Zoo in a cage with an orangutan. In 1975, white teenagers harassed Black students desegregating a Boston public school with the chant “Two, four, six, eight, assassinate the nigger apes.”
The ape caricature still colors how Black people are received in America. But this morning, the administration played the video off for laughs. “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in response to a comment request before the Truth Social posts were removed. (The Lion King features a monkey named Rafiki, but no apes appear in the film.)
The White House did not answer my questions about why the administration initially defended the video, or why it remained up on the president’s account for 12 hours. Even if a staffer did post the Obama video, its message is resonant with the president’s past statements and actions. Trump has called Somalis “low-IQ,” and his administration recently announced rules that will ban nearly 90 percent of African immigrant visa applicants.
