A video clip shared by President Donald Trump on social media depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys has been condemned as racist by prominent Democrats, the "Times" reports.
Towards the end of the one-minute video posted on Trump's Truth Social platform, the Obamas are shown with their faces on the bodies of monkeys for about a second.
The song The Lion Sleeps Tonight plays in the background as the Obamas appear.
The video repeats false claims that the ballot counting company Dominion Voting Systems helped to "steal" in the 2020 election by Trump.
As of this morning, the video had been liked several thousand times.
The office of Gavin Newsom, the governor of California and a potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2028, condemned the post. "Disgusting behavior by the president. Every Republican should condemn this. "Right away," he stressed on the social network X.
Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser and close confidant of President Obama, also criticized the footage.
"Let Trump and his racist followers be haunted by the fact that future Americans will embrace the Obama family as beloved figures and study him as a stain on our history," he wrote on X.
Obama was the first and only black president in American history and endorsed Trump's Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, during the 2024 presidential election campaign.
In the first year of his second term in the White House, Trump has increased his use of fabricated visuals on Truth Social and other platforms, often glorifying himself while mocking his critics.
Last year, Trump posted a video generated by artificial intelligence showing how Barack Obama was arrested in the Oval Office and appeared behind bars in an orange jumpsuit. He later posted an AI-generated clip of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wearing a fake mustache and sombrero. Jeffries called the image racist.