The ape caricature still colors how Black people are received in America. But Friday morning, the admin played the video off for laughs. “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle & Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” White House propagandist Karoline Leavitt wrote in response to a comment request before the Truth Social posts were removed. (The Lion King features a monkey named Rafiki, but no apes appear in the film.)
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@Nonilex well they had to make sure it was up for long enough that all the knuckle draggers saw it, didn't they.
@Nonilex
Absolutely disgusted behaviour by a sitting president.
#Trump supercharged his political career by claiming that Barack #Obama wasn’t American. Thursday, 16 minutes before midnight, Trump’s account on Truth Social posted a video that suggests Obama isn’t even human. It briefly shows the head of the first Black president & that of his wife superimposed onto the bodies of apes. They dance along to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
The clip is on the screen for only a moment before the recording returns to the voting-machine video. And just before noon Friday, both posts of the video were removed from #Trump’s Truth Social account. (When asked why, a White House official who declined to provide their name claimed that an unnamed employee “erroneously made the post.”)
In the interim, hundreds if not thousands of people responded to the clip with enthusiasm. Immediately after the video was first posted on Truth Social, the memecoin $APEBAMA was minted. Within 12 hours, more than $4 million worth of $APEBAMA had been traded back & forth. In an X group with the same name that now has hundreds of members, the pinned tweet implies that the meme stock will succeed because of how outrageous the video is: “this is pretty much on par with him calling Obama a nigga.”
Some members posted their own depictions of #Obama as a monkey or ape. The ape video’s apparent creator, the X user xerias_x, reposted the full video to their X account early this morning. Besides the Obamas, the video shows a menagerie of Democratic politicians as animals, bowing down to #Trump, who appears as a lion. It now has more than 1 million views.
@Nonilex as I’ve been trying to tell people forever and ever it has nothing to do with the cost of eggs. It is racism, and it is owning the Libs. They literally hate liberals. The biggest motivation for putting Trump back in office was owning the Libs. No one can convince me otherwise. It matters not what they say in interviews.
(xerias_x also seems to be the originator of an AIvideo #Trump reposted in Oct that shows Trump raining down what appears to be excrement on protesters from the sky.)
The “joke” that Trump’s account spread is plainly sinister. The idea that #Black people sit somewhere between white people & apes has long been used to justify #cruelty. In 1377, a historian wrote that Africans “have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals,” meaning they “are, as a whole, submissive to slavery.”
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