The White House has belatedly backed down from a racist video shared on President Donald Trump’s social media feed after blowback from Republicans.
The video promoting false claims of voter fraud concluded with a brief clip of images of former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama’s heads affixed to the bodies of apes. After initially trying to defend the post and leaving it up for hours — even labeling the outrage “fake” — the White House eventually gave into bipartisan backlash, removed it and changed its tack.
Its new explanation: The video was “erroneously” posted by a staffer.
Trump later Friday expanded on that, saying he had reviewed the first section of the video and passed it along to a staffer, who then failed to review the whole thing and catch the offensive content at the end.
“Somebody slipped and missed a very small part,” said Trump, who declined to apologize because he said he wasn’t at fault.
There are reasons to be skeptical of this explanation.
For one, the post was shared late Thursday night — shortly before midnight — during one of the president’s regular Truth Social onslaughts, full of dozens of posts and reposts.
For two, the full video was only a little over a minute long, meaning there wasn’t a lot for Trump to personally review.
And three, the White House initially defended the post and left it up for nearly 12 hours, which would seem a weird call if this was actually posted “erroneously.”
But the biggest point might be that we’ve been here before — a lot.
Trump’s social media feed over the years has at times resembled what you might expect from an alt-right provocateur. CNN reports that Trump often posts personally on Truth Social, including reposts of others’ posts, although a couple close aides also have access. But to the extent anybody around him is interested in avoiding episodes like this, there’s been remarkably little quality control.
In fact, it was a little over a decade ago that Trump’s campaign offered basically a carbon copy explanation for a poorly considered tweet.
Back in 2015, his Twitter feed suggested Iowans were dumb for favoring Trump’s opponent, Ben Carson, in the polls. “Too much #Monsanto in the #corn creates issues in the brain?” read a post that Trump’s account reposted.
Trump later posted: “The young intern who accidentally did a Retweet apologizes.”
(Despite blaming an intern, the sentiment matched something Trump himself would later say, in public.)
In 2016, Trump posted an image of Hillary Clinton in front of piles of cash and the words “most corrupt candidate ever” inside a six-sided star reminiscent of the Star of David. The image had previously appeared on antisemitic, White supremacist message boards, and Trump’s campaign soon replaced it with a circle in place of the six-sided star.
As president in 2017, Trump reposted a series of inflammatory anti-Muslim posts from a British far-right account — even as the White House conceded that it hadn’t verified the violent scenes that the videos depicted.
The White House initially stood by the posts. But when Trump was confronted with the hateful rhetoric of the group behind the videos, he told Piers Morgan: “If you are telling me they’re horrible people, horrible, racist people, I would certainly apologize if you’d like me to do that.”
In 2019, Trump reposted a series of tweets from British anti-immigration activist Katie Hopkins, who had a well-known history of hateful rhetoric including comparing migrants to cockroaches.
And in his own written post that year, he encouraged four non-White members of Congress to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” — even though three of the four he seemed to be referring to were American by birth. The post set off bipartisan condemnations, but Trump didn’t back down.
In 2020, he reposted a doctored image depicting then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer in Middle Eastern garb.
And he also reposted a video of people he said were from the Villages, a retirement community in Florida, calling them “great people” — even as the video showed a person chanting “White power.” (The post was later removed, and the White House said Trump hadn’t heard the “White power” portion of the video.)
He also reposted a video featuring a large number of dark-skinned people walking by, along with the words, “If you’re a woman you can either vote for Trump or wait until one of these monsters goes after you or your daughter.”
By 2025, when he was back in office, Trump used social media to go after Democratic leadership ahead of a looming shutdown. He posted — and kept posting — a racist, AI-generated video that depicted House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries with a sombrero and mustache and Schumer speaking in a fake voice.
The combined picture here is of someone who either approves of some of these extremely ugly sentiments, is happy to promote them, or is — at best — not terribly discerning about them.
Trump’s posted several things before that even many members of his own party were comfortable labeling racist and beyond the pale.
Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Black Republican in the Senate, called Thursday’s post “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” It’s now at least the third time he’s felt compelled to say something like that; he previously called the “White power” post “indefensible” and the “go back” post about non-White Democrats “racially offensive.”
When the lone Black GOP senator, who’s a close Trump ally, has to say this kind of thing repeatedly, one might think it’s time to put some safeguards in place — if for no other reason than to protect the president from himself.
The White House doesn’t seem to have done that. Nor has it or Trump apologized for reposting the video of the Obamas — which some prominent Republicans have said he should.
And when you look at the thrust of Trump’s feed and commentary over the years — and especially his xenophobic comments of late about Somalis — Thursday’s repost wasn’t exactly far outside the norm.
