Political Tribune

Donald Trump, GOP, Opinion, Racism, Social Media

Trump Shares Shock Video Targeting The Obamas — It Crosses A Disturbing Line

The president posted a racist image of the Obamas, amid an election conspiracy video, on Truth Social.

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The quality of content posted by Donald Trump on Truth Social has never been particularly high, for reasons of being false, conspiratorial, aesthetically ugly, or AI-generated. A post this week added “extremely racist” to the list, even beyond the type of stuff Trump has posted in the past.

On Friday morning, Trump reposted a nutty conspiracy video about the 2020 election, featuring various long-debunked assertions of when the votes came in and how. But near the end, the video included an image of Barack and Michelle Obama, depicted as apes, seeming to laugh at the “stealing” of the election.

“The roughly minute-long video otherwise focused on false election fraud claims about the 2020 presidential election, but at the very end it suddenly flashed to a clip of the Obamas’ faces superimposed on the heads of cartoon apes as the song ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ by The Tokens played in the background,” NBC News said of the video.

There was an immediate uproar, which even drew a very unconvincing denial from the White House.

“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King,” the White House said in a statement. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

It appeared that there was one such video, meeting that description, which had appeared in the past, and the Obama/apes image came from that. But the version posted by Trump this week, featuring the Obamas as apes, was stripped of that context.

The video was denounced by Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), who is himself Black.

There were other shocked reactions to Trump appearing to reach a new low:

Photo courtesy of an X screenshot. 

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Stephen Silver

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Stephen Silver is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, and contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Stephen has authored thousands of articles that focus on politics, technology, and the economy.

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