The Press with AFP
“A White House employee posted this content by mistake. It has been deleted,” a senior executive official told AFP, after the editing in question sparked a wave of condemnation even within the Republican Party, that of the American president.
“Racist”, “scavenger”, “despicable”: condemnations were pouring out in the United States on Friday before the conspiracy video montage was removed. The White House then denounced “false indignation”.
The video, a little over a minute long, presents supposed evidence of manipulation of the 2020 vote, which the Republican president insists against all evidence of having won.
At the end, a montage of the Obama couple very quickly appears, their hilarious faces on a primate body, the jungle as a backdrop.
“Donald Trump is a pernicious, vile and deranged scavenger,” reacted the leader of the Democratic minority in the American Congress, Hakeem Jeffries, on X. The African-American elected official called on the Republicans to “denounce the repugnant intolerance” of their leader.
In the conservative camp, where criticism of the American president is generally non-existent or very muted, Senator Tim Scott asked Donald Trump to “remove” the video.
“The most racist thing”
“I pray this is false, because this is the most racist thing I have seen come out of this White House,” the only black Republican senator wrote on X.
As of Friday morning, the video had received several thousand likes on Truth Social, but also a number of angry comments.
The montage was originally published by the American far-right website Patriot News Outlet, and republished twice by Donald Trump.
It takes up allegations, never proven, according to which the counting company Dominion Voting Systems participated in a large-scale revolt to bring Joe Biden to the White House in 2020 to the detriment of Donald Trump.
California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, potential 2028 presidential candidate and fierce opponent of Donald Trump, denounced “despicable behavior”.
For Democratic congressman Herb Conaway, “Trump is a vile and racist old man.”
The White House reacted, faithful to its offensive communications strategy, which consists of defending or amplifying the president’s messages, without ever acknowledging an error or expressing regret.
“This is taken from a video posted on the internet depicting President Trump as king of the jungle, and Democrats as characters from The Lion King. Stop this false indignation and report on something that, today, means something to the American public,” declared the spokesperson for the American president, Karoline Leavitt, in a press release sent to AFP.
Trump as “king of the jungle”
The video Karoline Leavitt is referring to is a cartoon created by the pro-Trump account @xerias_x. We see several democratic figures, for example Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, in a savannah setting, withDonald Trump represented as a lion.
But the conspiratorial video on electoral fraud broadcast by the American president only includes one very short extract from this cartoon, the one which shows the Obamas as primates.
During the first year of his second term in the White House, Donald Trump intensified his use of outrageous visuals to glorify himself or ridicule his detractors.
He also has a particular animosity for Barack Obama. Last year, he released an AI-generated video showing the first black president of the United States arrested in the Oval Office and then appearing behind bars in an orange prison jumpsuit.
He accuses him of “treason” for alleged participation in a “plot” around the 2016 presidential election.
The Trump administration is waging an open fight against “woke” ideology, a term used pejoratively by conservatives to denounce what they perceive as an excess of activism in favor of minorities.
The head of state has launched a policy of large-scale expulsion of undocumented immigrants and is openly playing on the fears of a segment of his white electorate of losing their political and cultural power.
