The White House is once again asking Americans to avert their eyes. After President Donald Trump used his social media account to share a video that includes a racist depiction of former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as primates in a jungle, press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed the backlash as “fake outrage.”
The 62-second clip was part of a late-night barrage of posts amplifying Trump’s debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Nearly all of the video recycles familiar conspiracy theories about voting machines. Near the end, a brief but unmistakable image flashes: two primates with the Obamas’ smiling faces imposed on them. Trump offered no commentary of his own, letting the imagery speak for him.
Leavitt did the rest. In a text response, she framed the clip as a jokey internet meme that casts Trump as “King of the Jungle” and Democrats as cartoon animals, urging critics to “report on something today that actually matters.” The message was clear: the problem is not the dehumanization of Black leaders, but the audacity of anyone pointing it out.
The footage itself is not new. It traces back to a longer video circulated by an influential conservative meme maker that depicts Democratic figures as animals. Even within that framework, the choice to portray the nation’s first Black president and first lady as primates taps into one of the oldest racist tropes in American life. That context did not trouble the White House.
Outside the administration, the response was blunter. The anti-Trump group Republicans Against Trump condemned the post, writing, “There’s no bottom.” It is a sentiment shared by critics who see a straight line from Trump’s earliest political notoriety to the present moment.
That line runs through birtherism, when Trump falsely claimed Obama was born in Kenya and demanded proof of citizenship; through his first term, when he derided majority-Black nations as “shithole countries”; and into his 2024 campaign rhetoric, when he said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” language historians have noted echoes that of Adolf Hitler. Each time, the pattern repeats: provocation, denial, and a demand that the public stop overreacting.
The administration’s meme-first media strategy relies on that cycle. Trump and official accounts regularly repost inflammatory or AI-generated content, while aides wave away criticism as humorless hysteria. It is a tactic that normalizes cruelty by reframing it as a joke and treats accountability as an inconvenience.
Leavitt’s defense of the latest post fits neatly into that playbook. By reducing a racist image to “fake outrage,” the White House sidesteps the substance of the criticism and signals that demeaning political opponents, even through imagery historically used to justify violence and exclusion, is fair game.
