Republican senator calls on Trump to delete racist Obama video as Democrats condemn ‘unhinged’ post – live | Donald Trump
GOP senator calls on Trump to delete racist video of Obamas
Tim Scott, the only Black Republican senator in Congress, had condemned the racist video that Donald Trump posted on social media, depicting the Obamas as apes.
“Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” Scott said. “The president should remove it.”
Key events
White House removes Trump post after furious backlash and says it was ‘erroneously’ made by a staffer
Following an intense backlash this morning, the White House has now taken down Trump’s Truth Social repost of a video showing a racist clip depicting the Obamas as apes.
Multiple outlets cite a senior White House official as saying:
A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down.
The post was up for 12 hours.
As we reported earlier, a few hours ago the White House had initially tried to brush off the outrage, defending Trump’s repost as “an internet meme video”.
Texas congresswoman Jasmine Crockett has also slammed the “racist, bigoted audacity” of Trump’s post, calling the president’s behaviour “disgusting and disturbing”.
Ending her X post, Crockett addressed her Republican peers:
But when will it be enough for those who continue to stand beside him? When will Republicans in Congress condemn his behavior? Your silence is complicity – and it is very loud.
Joining the chorus of disapproval today is Republican congressman Mike Lawler, a moderate representative from New York, who called the Trump’s post “wrong and incredibly offensive”.
Lawler said the video “should be deleted immediately with an apology offered”.
GOP senator calls on Trump to delete racist video of Obamas
Tim Scott, the only Black Republican senator in Congress, had condemned the racist video that Donald Trump posted on social media, depicting the Obamas as apes.
“Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” Scott said. “The president should remove it.”
‘Vile, unhinged and malignant bottom feeder’: Top congressional Democrats condemn Trump for sharing racist video of Obamas
Top Democrats in Congress have condemned Donald Trump for sharing a racist video of Barack and Michelle Obama that depicts them as apes.
Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, called the president a “vile, unhinged and malignant bottom feeder”. He noted that the Obamas were “brilliant, compassionate and patriotic Americans” who “represent the best of this country”.
“Why are GOP leaders like John Thune continuing to stand by this sick individual?” Jeffries wrote on X. “Every single Republican must immediately denounce Donald Trump’s disgusting bigotry.”
The Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, was similarly incensed by the video. “Racist. Vile. Abhorrent,” he said, while echoing Jeffries’ demand for GOP lawmakers to denounce Trump’s actions. “The President must immediately delete the post and apologize to Barack and Michelle Obama,” Schumer added, noting that sharing the video made the president look like a “small, envious man”.
Justice department announces ‘key participant’ in Benghazi terrorist attack in custody
The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, announced today that officials arrested one of the “key participants” in the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack that killed four US government officials, including the US ambassador to Libya, J Christopher Stevens.
Bondi said suspect Zubayar al-Bakoush was taken into custody at 3am ET on Friday. “We will prosecute this alleged terrorist to the fullest extent of the law. He’ll face charges related to murder, terrorism, arson, among others,” Bondi told reporters today.
The FBI director, Kash Patel, added that he needed to protect the “integrity” of the investigation, and could not expand on operational details, but noted his department carried out what is known as a “foreign transfer of custody” to bring the suspect to the US.
A reminder that the attack on the American government compounds was a political flashpoint of the Obama administration, triggering years of scrutiny and investigations into the government’s preparedness and response to the attack on the consulate, particularly focused on Barack Obama and then secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
A Republican-led House committee report, released in 2016, found that while there were government security failures, and blamed then defense secretary Leon Panetta for a delay in deploying forces to respond to the attack, Clinton was ultimately not to blame. At the time, Democrats and critics of the investigation into the attack accused GOP lawmakers of pursuing a politically motivated probe as Clinton pursued the Democratic presidential nomination.
‘Please stop the fake outrage’: White House attempts to brush off racist video reposted by Trump
My colleague Richard Luscombe notes that the White House has tried to brush off the outrage caused by Donald Trump reposting a racist video that depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
In a statement sent to the Guardian, Karoline Leavitt, linked to a post on X last October by a separate rightwing account, which features a 55-second video from which the Obama clip appears to have been taken. It begins with the Obamas depicted as apes, later shows Biden’s head superimposed on a monkey body and other prominent Democrats depicted as other animals, while Trump is shown as a male lion.
“This is 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,” Leavitt said.
Angela Giuffrida
Hundreds of people are protesting in Milan against the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at the Winter Olympics.
Carrying banners reading “ICE Out” and “Fuck ICE”, those criticising the presence of US federal immigration agents are mostly students, gathered in Piazzale Leonardo da Vinci, in front of a building of the Politecnico University in the eastern part of the city.
More protests are planned on Friday afternoon and again on Saturday involving a variety of activists groups, including pro-Palestinian, environmental campaigners and students fighting for affordable housing.
A reminder that the US vice-president, JD Vance, and secretary of state, Marco Rubio, are in Milan for the games. Vance is due to meet the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, later today.
The US state department said last week that several federal agencies, including ICE, will be at the Olympics to help protect visiting Americans.
Donald Trump will begin his day in Washington. At 3pm ET he’ll sign executive orders in the Oval Office. That’s currently not open to the press, but we’ll let you know if that changes.
Later, the president will travel to Palm Beach, Florida, where he’ll meet with the president of Honduras on Saturday. Trump will then attend a Super Bowl watch party on Sunday before travelling back to the White House.
My colleague Taz Ali is covering the latest out of Oman, where talks are ongoing between Iranian and US officials in Muscat, Oman, which are thought to be focused on Tehran’s nuclear programme.
Oman’s foreign minister, Sayyid Badr Albusaidi, who is mediating the talks, held separate meetings with Iran’s top diplomat, Abbas Aragchi, and US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
In a statement, the Omani foreign ministry said the meetings so far have focused on preparing the conditions for “resuming diplomatic and technical negotiations”.
Taz notes that Tehran is deeply worried that Trump may still carry out his threat of striking Iran, not least because of the not-so-subtle comments made by the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, on Thursday.
“While these negotiations are taking place, I would remind the Iranian regime that the president has many options at his disposal, aside from diplomacy, as the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in the history of the world,” she told reporters.
A military escalation is not completely beyond the realms of possibility and could serve Donald Trump’s interests, according to experts, who also note the US mobilisation of a large military force in the region, or an “armada”, as the president called it.
Shannon Watts, gun violence prevention activist and founder of Moms Demand Action, did not mince words in her response to Donald Trump and his racist video depicting Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as monkeys.
“Every Democrat who votes for the agenda and nominees of this racist, bigoted, misogynistic piece of shit who’s destroying our country is voting for this, too,” Watts posted on X.
Melanie D’Arrigo, the executive director of the Campaign for New York Health,” said: “This doesn’t need a lot of explaining – Donald Trump is a racist pushing a white supremacist agenda. That’s obvious to everyone paying attention.”
Social media influencer and political commentator Harry Sisson said that the “racist and disgusting” video was “beneath the office of the presidency, like everything that he does”.
“Every American must condemn this,” he posted on X.
‘It’s been brutal’: Cubans caught in crosshairs of Trump’s deportation push
Ruaridh Nicoll
When Rosaly Estévez “self-deported” from Miami to Havana last November, US immigration officers bid farewell by removing her ankle monitor. The 32-year-old had been told she was about to be detained, so she left with her three-year-old son, Dylan, a US citizen.
Heidy Sánchez, 43, wasn’t given a choice. She was forcibly removed from Florida last April but, worrying about Cuba’s failing healthcare system, she left her two-year-old daughter, Kaylin, behind with her American husband, Carlos.
“My little girl was still breastfeeding,” she said. “Waiting to get on the plane, my breasts were swollen, and I kept saying, ‘Kaylin must be hungry.’” Sánchez had struggled for years to conceive and Kaylin is her only child.
Neither woman has a criminal record, but both have been caught up in the US government’s push to deport Cuban immigrants. Now they each live in small towns south of the Cuban capital of Havana, passing their days talking to lawyers and family in the US.
“It’s been brutal,” said Estévez. “Imagine Dylan hugging his phone every night when he sees his dad. I wouldn’t wish this on any mother.”
As the US government heaps pressure on Cuba, cutting off access to its oil shipments, Donald Trump has framed the campaign as an effort to make the island safe for Cuban Americans.
“A lot of people that live in our country are treated very badly by Cuba,” Trump said recently. “They all voted for me, and we want them to be treated well. We’d like to be able to have them go back to a home in their country, where they haven’t seen their family, their country for many, many decades.”
‘A stain on our history’: outrage after Trump posts racist video about Obamas
The condemnation on Donald Trump and the racist video he posted on Truth Social depicting Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, as monkeys continues to trickle in Friday morning.
Ben Rhodes, who served as deputy national security adviser under Obama, called Trump “a stain on our history”.
“Let it haunt Trump and his racist followers that future Americans will embrace the Obamas as beloved figures while studying him as a stain on our history,” Rhodes said on X.
George Conway, the ex-husband of Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, reminded his followers that he had been calling Trump out over racism since 2019 and linked to an op ed he wrote for the Washington Post titled: Trump Is a Racist President.
The post was still up almost eight hours later, alongside another post of a video that accused the Democratic party of being anti-Black. Continuing on his social media spree in which he posted more than 60 times over the course of three hours, the president has once again begun posting to Truth Social about an hour ago.
Trump posts racist video depicting Obamas as monkeys
Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage.
Donald Trump went on a massive social media spree overnight that included posting on Truth Social an election conspiracy video that ended with a clip depicting former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as monkeys.
The racist depiction of the Obamas – the first Black president and first lady in American history – appears at the end of a one-minute video perpetuating the false and disproven claims that ballot-counting company Dominion Voting Systems helped steal the 2020 presidential election from Trump. The company in 2023 settled for $787.5m with Fox News in a landmark defamation lawsuit.
For two seconds, the video shows the smiling faces of the Obamas superimposed on monkeys bobbing to The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
As of Friday morning, the video has been liked more than 2,500 times and reposted more than 1,100 times, as prominent Democrats decried the post.
“Disgusting behavior by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this. Now,” said the press office of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, a longtime Trump critic and potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate.
“This is overt racism. Full stop. There’s no ‘misinterpretation’ and no excuse. This is who he is, who he’s always been, and why he should never be anywhere near power again,” political strategist Adam Parkhomenko posted on X.
The video was just one of more than 60 posts the president made on Truth Social over the course of three hours. In addition to repeating lies about the 2020 presidential election, Trump posted the Trump Accounts Super Bowl ad and calls to add his face to Mount Rushmore.
More to come.
