US President Donald Trump refused to apologise Friday for a video posted on his social media account depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys, though he said he condemned the post as the White House shifted the blame to staff.The video shared on Trump’s Truth Social account Thursday sparked censure across the US political spectrum, with the White House initially rejecting “fake outrage” only to then blame the post on an error by a staff member.
“I didn’t make a mistake,” Trump said on Air Force One late Friday when asked if he would apologise for the post. Asked if he condemns the racist imagery in the video, the American president replied: “Of course I do.”Democrats slammed Trump as “vile” over the clip of the Obamas — the first Black president and first lady in US history — while a senior Republican senator said the video was blatantly racist.Near the end of the one-minute-long video promoting conspiracies about Republican Trump’s 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, the Obamas were shown with their faces on the bodies of monkeys for about one second.The video, uploaded late Thursday amid a flurry of other posts, repeated false allegations that ballot-counting company Dominion Voting Systems helped steal the election from Trump. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt initially played down the row, saying that the images were “from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King.””Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public,” she said in a statement to AFP.But almost exactly 12 hours after the post appeared on Trump’s account there was an unusual concession from an administration that normally refuses to admit the slightest mistake. “A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down,” a White House official said.Speaking on board Air Force One on Friday, Trump stood by the thrust of the video’s claims about election fraud, but said he had not seen the offensive clip. “I just looked at the first part… and I didn’t see the whole thing,” Trump said, adding that he “gave it” to staffers to post and they also didn’t watch the full video. There was no immediate comment from the Obamas.Former VP Kamala Harris, who has long condemned Trump’s divisive racial rhetoric, called out the White House’s backpedalling in a post on X on Friday. “No one believes this cover up from the White House, especially since they originally defended this post,” she wrote. “We are all clear-eyed about who Donald Trump is and what he believes.” While Democrats pounced on the post, it was the outrage from some members of Republican Party that appeared to trigger the about-face. Tim Scott, the only Black Republican senator and once a contender for the 2024 presidential nomination, called the video “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”
