After Bipartisan Backlash, Trump Deletes Video

President Trump hit delete Friday after posting a video that Democrats and some of his Republican allies called racist. The minute-long clip, shared in a Truth Social post late Thursday, pushed claims about 2020 election fraud before ending with Barack and Michelle Obama's faces pasted onto cartoon apes as "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" plays. The imagery, echoing long-used racist caricatures of Black people, landed during Black History Month and triggered a quick, bipartisan backlash, NBC News reports. The post disappeared late Friday morning. A White House official said a staffer "erroneously" made the post, the BBC reports.

The White House initially defended the video. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed criticism as "fake outrage," saying it was from "an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King." Condemnation, however, crossed party lines.

• In a post on X, Sen. Tim Scott, the only Black Republican senator, said: "Praying it was fake because it's the most racist thing I've seen out of this White House. The President should remove it."
• Sen. Pete Ricketts, another Republican, said on X: "Even if this was a 'Lion King' meme, a reasonable person sees the racist context to this. The White House should do what anyone does when they make a mistake: remove this and apologize.
• Republican Rep. Mike Lawler also urged Trump to take the post down, calling it "wrong and incredibly offensive."

On the Democratic side, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer labeled the video "Racist. Vile. Abhorrent" in a post on X. Trump, he said, "must immediately delete the post and apologize to Barack and Michelle Obama, two great Americans who make Donald Trump look like a small, envious man." House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, calling the president a "vile, unhinged, and malignant bottom feeder," urged Republicans to "denounce Donald Trump's disgusting bigotry." The AP reports that the Rev. Bernice King, daughter Martin Luther King Jr., also spoke out, saying Black Americans are "beloved of God as postal workers and professors, as a former first lady and president. We are not apes."