Trump doubles down on racist video, saying no staffer has been disciplined

Donald Trump on Thursday continued to brush off widespread backlash over a racist video posted to his social media account last week, and said no White House staffer had faced consequences for the offensive post.

Asked by Weijia Jiang of CBS News on Thursday whether he had “fired or disciplined that staffer who posted the video from your account that included the Obamas”, Trump said that he had not.

The president then went on to excuse the racist clip, which depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as cartoon apes, as a reference to The Lion King, an animated film that has no apes in it.

The video posted on Trump’s Truth Social account late at night spliced together part of a documentary that presented conspiracy theories about the 2020 election as fact, and a few seconds of the racist animation of the Obamas.

As Trump sought to downplay the abject racism his White House initially defended, before blaming an unnamed staffer, he described the video as a “fairly long video, they had a little piece that had to do with the Lion King”. The entire video was, in fact, just over a minute.

In Trump’s telling, that racist video was not a problem because it had already been widely seen online. “It’s been very well – it’s been shown all over the place, long before that as posted,” Trump claimed, apparently referring to the full-length animated clip the racist depiction of the Obamas was taken from, in which he was depicted as a lion.

“But that was … a very strong piece on voter fraud,” Trump added, of the video laying out baseless conspiracy theories, “and the piece that you’re talking about was all over the place, many times, I believe for years.”

JD Vance also dismissed concerns about the racist video on Wednesday, telling reporters in Azerbaijan that, because Trump’s vice-president was traveling, “the controversy had started and then died out before I even paid attention to it”.

Vance then repeated Trump’s false claim that the video, which was up for 12 hours, was taken down as soon as the racist imagery was discovered. In fact, the White House press secretary initially defended the video and it remained on Trump’s account for hours until it was deleted after even Republican supporters of the president denounced it as a racist.

“You know, the president said a staffer posted a video, he hadn’t even watched the whole thing, when he watched the whole thing he took it down,” Vance said. “It’s not a real controversy.”

“Should he apologize for posting a video and then taking it down? No, I don’t think so,” Vance said. “I think people post things on social media and if you post something and you don’t like it, you can take it down.”

The initial post from Trump’s account drew immediate backlash from both sides of the aisle, including several prominent Republican lawmakers.

“Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” Tim Scott, the Senate’s sole Black Republican, said on X.

“Even if this was a Lion King meme, a reasonable person sees the racist context to this,” wrote Nebraska senator Pete Ricketts. “The White House should do what anyone does when they make a mistake: remove this and apologize.”

Mike Lawler, a New York representative, called the video “wrong and incredibly offensive”, later telling ABC he thought the creator of the racist animation “is an idiot”.

But even as the White House took the rare step to remove the video, the president has refused to apologize for the overtly racist post.

“I didn’t make a mistake,” he said last week.