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In February 2009, weeks into America’s first Black presidency, civil rights leaders and elected officials protested a cartoon in the New York Post that depicted a chimpanzee and invoked the Obama-era stimulus bill. The paper insisted the image wasn’t "about the president" but was legitimate satire in the rich tradition of American cartoons, though it did apologize if anyone was offended.
Seventeen years later, during Black History Month, that defense is on display again, but this time it's to defend the president of the United States. What's different is how AI has enabled the mass production of "slopaganda," and is weaponizing images and views that once would have been far outside the Overton window of rational political discourse, only to later be justified as mere memes. And that approach doesn't seem to be working for the Trump administration any longer.
What's Happening?
A 62-second video posted to President Donald Trump’s Truth Social account included a racist depiction of Barack and Michelle Obama: their faces appear on apes’ bodies for about one second near the end, as "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" plays. The same clip was also a piece of election conspiracy-spreading, saying without evidence that voting machines or tabulators showed "potential election interference," and echoing Trump’s continuing false narrative that the 2020 election was fraudulent. It is not known whether Trump had watched the clip to the end.
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In a statement to Newsweek, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, "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."
The issue is for the administration is that the meme war is getting uglier at the same moment Trump’s numbers are getting weaker. The latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll, released February 5, puts his overall job approval at 39 percent, with only 36 percent approving of his handling of the economy and foreign policy. Crucially, 51 percent said they strongly disapprove, a level Marist last saw in the aftermath of January 6, 2021.
On the substance, the numbers are even harsher. In AP-NORC polling from December, only 31 percent approved of Trump’s handling of the economy, the lowest economic approval AP-NORC has recorded for him across either term. His overall approval in that poll is 36 percent (down from 42 percent in March), while approval on immigration fell from 49 percent to 38 percent.
In any case, the racism isn’t a "gaffe" that accidentally overshadowed an otherwise serious argument. The administration’s defenders will argue that it’s just online culture today, that politics has always been nasty, and that opponents are too sensitive. But this isn't only about nastiness. AI produces such plausible-looking unreality at scale.
Trump has been escalating the playbook for years. Sometimes it’s crude symbolism: in 2016, House Speaker Paul Ryan publicly condemned Trump’s use of an image criticized as antisemitic: an illustration of Hillary Clinton set against money with a six-pointed star and the label "most corrupt candidate ever." In 2018, Trump posted a Game of Thrones-styled "Sanctions Are Coming" graphic to announce Iran sanctions.
In March 2024, he posted a video showing a truck decal depicting President Joe Biden hog-tied, an image the Biden campaign said was stoking political violence. In May the same year, Trump’s Truth Social shared a video containing the phrase "unified reich," a scandal his campaign waved away as a staffer’s oversight.
By then, AI was making the meme war more potent. Trump also shared AI-generated "Swifties for Trump" images and a fake Taylor Swift endorsement—captioned "I accept!"
In Trump’s second term, the line between campaign trolling and state communication has blurred further. The White House posted an "ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight" clip showing migrants being chained and processed for removal, which Amnesty International USA’s Amy Fischer called "particularly inhumane." In May 2025, Trump posted a meme featuring Pepe the Frog—an image associated with the online far right—alongside a QAnon-linked slogan ("nothing can stop what is coming").
When the White House was questioned about an AI-altered image in another controversy involving civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong being led away in handcuffs during immigration raids in Minnesota, the administration responded: "Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue."
This is the environment in which the "Obamas as apes" clip lands during Black History Month. Trump himself marked the month with the following words: "This month, however, we do not celebrate our differences. Instead, we celebrate the contributions of black Americans to our national greatness and their enduring commitment to the American principles of liberty, justice, and equality — the principles that wrested the Western Hemisphere from monarchies and empires, ended slavery, saved Europe, put a man on the moon, and built the freest, most just, and most prosperous society ever known to mankind."
What is the Right Saying?
Republicans have periodically recognized that certain imagery is radioactive: Paul Ryan called Trump’s 2016 Clinton graphic "antisemitic," a rare moment of boundary-setting.
At other times, they shrug. When Trump posted an AI clip mocking Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries with racialized stereotypes in 2025, Vice President JD Vance waved off backlash: "I think it’s funny."
As for the latest controversy, the White House has called on Newsweek to "stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public."
What is the Left Saying?
Democrats are already calling out the Obamas clip. Gavin Newsom’s office wrote, "Disgusting behavior by the President… Every single Republican must denounce this. Now." Ben Rhodes, a former Obama adviser, said, "Let it haunt Trump and his racist followers… [future Americans] will embrace the Obamas… while studying him as a stain." The broader left critique is that the meme war is not harmless, but a cloak for bigotry.
What Happens Next?
Two things can be true at once: Trump’s meme war is juvenile, and it is deadly serious. It’s juvenile in content: apes, sombreros, QAnon frogs, pop songs. It’s serious in effect: it trains millions of people to treat politics as a game where nothing is beyond mockery.
The immediate question is whether Republicans actually do what Newsom has demanded and denounce it clearly today. The next policy fight will likely be about rules, including the First Amendment minefield around regulating political deepfakes. States are already experimenting with deepfake laws for elections, but some of those efforts are meeting legal challenges. Trump himself signed a federal law targeting nonconsensual intimate deepfakes—the Take It Down Act—showing that Washington can move when the harm is obvious. But political deepfakes are harder: they’re wrapped in "satire."
The more Trump tries to govern as a content creator, the more he forces the country into a stark choice: treat the presidency as a reality show or insist that some lines are still meant to be real.
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