One of the many seedy guiding principles Donald Trump acquired from his mentor Roy Cohn was “admit nothing, deny everything,” and today that approach was evident as the former Apprentice host tried to wiggle out of a vile AI generated video posted on his Truth Social depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
“No, I didn’t make a mistake,” the self-declared “least racist president …in a long time” Trump said tonight of apologizing to the former First Couple about the racist post. Still putting the blame for the posting on an unnamed lower-level staffer, POTUS was talking to reporters on Air Force One traveling Friday from DC to his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
“I look at a lot of, thousands of things, I looked at the beginning of it, it was fine,” he added, according to pool reports. “If you look at where it came from, I guess it was a take off of the Lion King.”
Never one to take responsibility or admit knowledge of things if they go wrong or get blowback like this late night post of the Obamas did from almost everyone, even some hardcore MAGAheads, Trump also said: “I didn’t see the whole thing. I guess during the end of it there was some kind of a picture that people don’t like. I wouldn’t like it either.”
“We took it down as soon as we found out,” Trump insisted on the plane Friday. The Republican did reply “Of course I do” when asked tonight if he repudiated the racist message in the video. Still, the statement that the video was taken down quickly is not entirely true once its obvious depiction got a fierce reception.
First posted late last year by a “@XERIAS_X” account, the 55-second video portrays Trump as a lion, while Hillary Clinton and now NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani are depicted as a warthog and hyena respectively. In case, there was anything vague about where this was all going, a two-second scene appears at the end of the video with the Obamas as apes, dancing in the jungle to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
Condemned by the likes of would-be 2028 candidates Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California andf Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania plus every other Democrat in the land, the loud dog whistling caused even Trump loyalist Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) to blast the video. Running to be the next Governor of South Carolina, Scott tweeted he was “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it.”
Calling something the “most racist thing” from Trump is really calling it out. The fact that the posting came six days into Black History Month and as more questions about connections distraction king Trump and others in his orbit had to now deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein did not seem like a coincidence.
Earlier the White House took its usual counter attack stance (another Cohn rule), with Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defending the post. “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King,” Leavitt said. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
As Deadline noted earlier Friday, there aren’t any apes in Disney’s Lion King, so the WH response is a bit off, to say the least. Nonetheless, as a the fallout increased, the administration deleted the offensive material . Soon after they announced “A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down.”
Putting the blame on staff is nothing new for Trump — he’s been doing it for a least a decade if not more.
Tonight Trump asserted he knew what was going on among his staff, even though he was contending he didn’t know what they were posting in his name. “”I liked the beginning, I saw it, and just passed it on,” he said, not giving any indication the person who did post it would suffer any consequences. “I didn’t do it by the way, this was done by someone else, it was a re-Truth.”
What is a certain truth is that while Trump, who started his political career attacking Hawaii-born Barack Obama‘s citizenship and American birth, was declaring he hadn’t done something that he had done, the former POTUS and FLOTUS were taking the high road.
Barack Obama & Michelle Obama on stage at 2024 Democratic National Convention in the former First Lady’s hometown of Chicago, Ill (Photo:Getty)
Obama, who Trump clearly fears, and the ex-First Lady took to social media Friday, but ignored Trump and the despicable video. Instead they both praised American athletes participating in the XXV Winter Games that opened today in Italy.
Giving a sense how Team Trump is viewed by many outside the USA, Team USA was cheered loudly during the opening ceremony of this year’s Olympics. On the other hand, Vice President JD Vance was equally loudly booed and jeered as he stood in the VIP section of Milan’s San Siro Stadium before its 60,000-strong crowd.