Bulwark Takes - LIVE REACTION: Trump Posts Racist Video Depicting Obamas as Apes

Episode Date: February 6, 2026

Sam Stein, Tim Miller, and Andrew Egger react to Trump's racist video last night depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. As the White House defends the post, Republicans like Sen. Tim Scott are "praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House" and calling for it be removed.

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Hey, everyone. You're about to watch a video of me, Andrew Eger, and Tim, talking about an incredibly racist video that Donald Trump posted late last night. We recorded our take on it early on Friday morning. By the time we were done shortly after, the White House had decided actually, we're going to take this thing down. Now, they had earlier defended the video saying, I was just a meme from the Lion King. but after a number of other Republican lawmakers subsequently said,

you should take it down, they decided to take it down. They also said, and I kid you not, that it was erroneously posted by some staffer. It doesn't quite make sense because it went on Trump's own feed at 1144 p.m. With a number of other crazy posts that we also got into in our video. So to believe that, you'd have to believe that some staffer was just sitting up through the night posting directly to Trump's account. Probably not the case. My theory is that the staffer share him videos and he decides to post him himself. But that's their excuse for this one. Anyways, we want to make sure that when you saw our take on this, that you understood that we recorded it prior to the White House erasing the video.

Hope you enjoy the take. All right, folks, it's happened again. It's happened again. Our president has done something pretty damn racist. Hi, I'm Sam Stein, managing editor at the bulwark here with my buddy. Andrew Eger. We are going live, even though this happened overnight, but it's kind of blowing up right now. Last night at around 1145 p.m., the President of the United States, as he frequently does,

was on a posting rampage. Literally, just go check true social. It's nuts. So many weird videos. I don't know where he gets these clips. Maybe we can get into that later. But among them was one of the more racist things I've ever seen. from a president, definitely one of the most racist, maybe the most racist thing ever seen for president.

Let's play the clip. And you guys can just sort of discuss amongst yourselves then, Andrew. I'll take your thoughts after that. Let's play it. Or we can just look at the screenshot of it. Most of the important information is being communicated by the screenshot, right? I mean, this is. But basically, yeah.

It's a two-second clip. Yeah. Go ahead, Andrew. Describe it. Yeah. So very, very weird. Should we watch like the full video? the thing about this is like a two-second clip of the Obama's superimposed onto the bodies of

dancing apes. The two-second clip comes at the end of about a minute-long, totally unrelated video that the president posted, which was also insane about, you know, totally invented election conspiracies, 4G internet-connected microchips embedded in voting machines, changing ballots from him to Biden and Michigan in 2020. So the whole thing was insane. It was not this exact same thing. There was nothing racist in that original 16. second video, then there's this random two-second clip of a different video posted by a pro-Trump creator last year. Hold on.

We actually have the video now. Yeah, let's just do the whole thing. The whole thing, and then we'll talk about it on the back end, but let's play the whole video now. Initiated by a court order, the Michigan investigation team obtained forensic access to a DS200 tabulator, the machine that counts of votes. A tellit 4G wireless chip manufactured in Taiwan, who's a. discovered embedded into the motherboard. The voting machine tapes clearly indicate

modem engagement and transmission of election data. Some of the anomalies that we noticed in the 2020 general elections that five key states all stopped counting at a certain time. This is by the way disturbed weird. These were all where software, the many machines, the SNS machines were used to be the smartmatic brains being software. So when the vote stopped counting, and this has been noted

in other countries as well, President Trump was significantly ahead. When reporting and counting resumed, there was a massive spike occurred that favored Joe Biden. That's where the Italian satellites came in right there. And then back.

And that's the whole thing. And it just ends. So he posts this, right? And everyone's like, you know, Donald Trump posts insane election slop all the time. So that was not necessarily so noticeable in and of itself. But people kind of pricked up their ears at the insane depiction of the Obama's there at the end for good reason.

This has been all over the internet this morning. Right. So here you have Barack and Michelle Obama depicted as monkeys. It doesn't get more racist than that. It doesn't. And anyone who wants to argue that it's like, well, he's being funny or something. No, it's just racist. Okay. Now, here's where it gets even more ridiculous. So the White House was pressed on this this morning, and they put out a response that charitably is insane. Carolyn Levitt says, this is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the

king of the jungle and Democrats as characters from the lying king. Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public. She shared the full video. It also depicted Hillary Clinton as a bore. Hakeem Jeffries is a mere cat. Neither of those obviously were included in Trump's post. Just a fact-checking here.

There are no monkeys in Lion King. I believe we have a graphic of the Lion King characters, if we can put it up because we do journalism here. Can we put up the Lion King graphic, please, so that people can understand that there are no monkeys in it? We'll get to that. We're running a little slow today. But the charitable explanation here

is our president wasn't trying to be racist. He was just up late at night posting weird internet memes and conspiracy videos. And that as a defense is so ridiculous, so insulting, so pathetic that you got to laugh at it, Andrew. Yeah, I mean, a lot of this comes back down to like the insane nihilistic sort of half-ironic posture of what so much of right-wing meme culture is. Like the idea, oh, that wasn't racist. That was just a meme. is like such a funny, ludicrous thing to say on its face because so much of what this right-wing meme culture draws on

is just like the broadest, most ridiculous stereotypes and caricatures and bigotry. And, I mean, like, just really awful. Like the idea, oh, you know, we weren't doing black people as apes for racist reasons. We were just doing it for funny Lion King-related reasons. I mean, like, it's, it's straightforwardly crazy. But I think it does also point to something that's, like,

kind of new about the way that Trump approaches media now in his second term. It's weird because he was all over Twitter in his first term, but he wasn't like consuming a lot of Twitter. He would consume a lot of TV. He would consume cable news. And that was like how he got his, you know, screen time for the day. Ever since he built truth social, he has been noticeably different in the way that he approaches just sort of like being on the screen. And it is that he is actually mainlining his own algorithm of like the craziest most slop-filled, most hate-filled, most lunatic studded website out there. And he's just on it all the time.

He's like up all night long when he should be sleeping, just scrolling and reposting stuff that he thinks is funny. And we're going to get to some of that stuff. Like there's some other videos. I'll push this to the end of our discussion. There's some other videos that if he just went through his truth feed and see what he was reposting, you'd be like, oh my God, like you have an addiction. You've got to put this down. And your algorithm is so fucked.

it's feeding you nonsense. His brain was already so cooked before this. And the degree to which he is in sloppifying his own mind every day cannot be overstated. I believe we are able to post the Lion King visual at this point. Look at that.

Here we go. Okay, folks, there are no monkeys in here. There is one monkey. There's a monkey. There's a monkey. There's a monkey. I'm so sorry. My apologies.

He's the one with the staff. I'm a little bit behind of my Lion King knowledge. My kids are big in a Lion King right now. There are no apes. So it makes no fucking sense. Again, we don't need to equivocate. It's racist or deranged or a combination of the two.

It's usually a combination of the two these days with the big. Yeah, but I think here's where I come down. It's like, if this was a one-time thing where, you know, he just happened to stumble upon a video and maybe he didn't watch the whole way through and blah, blah, blah, whatever, you would have more willingness to excuse the behavior, but this is just obviously a pattern for the guy. And he'll be out there and say he's the least racist person in the world. But I think fundamentally there's just an obvious pattern here,

whether it's Central Park Five stuff, whether it's depicting Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and sombreros, just how he talks about Mexicans, how he treats black female reporters. There is a clear, established, pattern. And to deny it is to actually be, what's the word, subjective. You want to be honest about these things. And I think you have to go ahead. There's a head in the sand element, too. I mean, you could go on and on and on. I mean, the whole, the whole kind of premise of his

sort of immigration policy, which is that we're importing the third world, you know, become the third world sort of. Haitians, cats and dogs in Springfield. The only, the only refugees he wants to let in our boar farmers, white guys from South Africa. You know, I mean, just it's, it's a pretty standard, uh, pattern of behavior and policy from the White House. And I do think like, I mean, there has been, it's on one level, it's kind of funny to see reaction from, from, you know, some Republicans this morning who are like, oh, gosh, you know, the president's really crossed the line with this one.

Because on the one hand, we're here talking about it. It was totally insane. Like, it's jaw on the floor sort of stuff. And on the other hand, it's like, where are you been for, for all this time? Where have you been? Where have you ended? So let's get to that. So Tim Scott, who is the center from South Carolina. He runs the National Senate Campaign Committee, which is charged with electing Senate Republicans. This is where we're on Twitter. You can see right there. Praying it's fake. It was fake because it's the most racist thing I've seen out of this White House. The President should remove it. First of all, this White House is interesting. It should be a White House. Although I guess pre-Civil War, you could probably say there's some more racist things. And maybe even in post-Civil War and construction. I like the implication of the most racist thing I've seen out of this white house, which seems

to suggest. Woodrow Wilson did screen some Nazi propaganda in the White House. I suppose you can count that here. But also, well, I was going to say it raises the question, what's the second most? Right, exactly. He seemed like, does he have a ranking system? What's the third most? I'd be very curious for Tim Scott's response to that.

Also, it's not fake. They're out there saying it's real. It's real. Yeah. And I mean, the one, like, if you wanted to do the steel man of all, Steelman, the weird thing of it being like randomly attached to the end of this other video, like, okay, maybe he's like screen grabbing or somebody else's screen grabbing and they meant to do most of the election stuff. They accidentally got a little of the AI racist slop in there by

mistake. If that had happened, which is like not a totally implausible reading of like just the video itself, but the White House could have very easily gotten up this morning and been like, oh, you know, like actually didn't mean to share the ludicrous racist slop. We only meant to share the election slop. Instead, they go to the match defending it because they do know. No, this is their people. I mean, it's like it's, it is, this video was created by this guy. You can see his watermark up there on the screen. He's just like an AI right wing maga, griper meme guy.

And, and he's followed by various people inside the White House. Harmeet Dillon follows him on X. Donald Trump has posted his content multiple times before. If you've seen, if you remember that video of, on that Trump posted very famously during the, the latest no King's protest of, of him flying a, fighter jet with King Trump written on the side and dropping, you know, payloads of human feces all over the protesters at the No King's March. This is the same creator who made this stuff.

So this guy's content is obviously coming up in Trump's truth social algorithm all the time. And like I was just saying, he's cooking his brain even more and more and more every day on just the grossest, dumbest, most ridiculous content you can imagine. Tim Miller is going to join us in a bit, I think, because he can't resist. I will just, let me say about on that point about, well, this is just, you know, it's a little snippet in a larger video. I'm sorry. Like, even if they had, and they didn't try, you're right. They didn't try to spin it as, oh, he didn't know what was in the video.

Even if they had, like, I don't, I don't think you can responsibly give them the benefit of the doubt here. Like, this is the president of the United States with the biggest platform in the world. There is a responsibility to post and know what you're posting. and then on top of that, the history of what he has done. Like, this is a deeply either unwell man, but also it's a man who is pushing racist bullshit into everyone's feeds. And you don't get to say, well, you know, it was just a snippet of the video. He didn't watch the whole thing.

No, that doesn't fly. Tim, welcome to the chat, buddy. Hey, what's up? I was excited to jump on the live chat because I just taped the pod for today, David French. He's awesome. And I was so mad at myself. I don't know if you guys have covered this, because we did cover the lion, King

statement. That's what we're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's been a minute since I watched

the Lion King and it didn't occur to me that there actually aren't. We talked about this. There are, there's a monkey. There's a one guy with a stick.

There's a lot of monkeys. There are no apes. There are no, but there are no, these plural. There are no apes. Very famous opening scene of the Lion King

with the sun coming up over the horizon and everybody bowing at Pride Rock. There are a lot of monkeys. in that scene. It's also not true. There's only one monkey. Andrew, you know your fucking lying. There are no age. Sorry. My kids are zero before. Can we find a photo of that

original? We've already played it. Yeah. Let's put it up again. Put it up. No, no, no. Tim Scott. The Lion King. I want the Lion King picture. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's not the photo he's talking about. But yeah, I don't. He wants the famous. But the, this is the whole cast. Okay. There's one monkey with a staff. What's his name, Andrew? Rafiki. Rafiki. Rafiki is the monkey of the staff.

The idea of going All Zepruder on this, like, aha, you know, what are we doing? Well, I think it's in it, but it's not a pruder. It's just a fair point that, like, look, all we could do is take them at their word. They could have said Donald Trump didn't see that. He's very sorry since the policy to the general Obama.

That would have been one option. They didn't do that. They said, uh, guys, calm down. This is just a Lion King meme. And like, Rand, and, you know, Hillary Clinton was a bore. Okay. I mean, Hageen Chapries was a mirror cap. that makes it better. He was the mere cat, Hakeem Jeffries, and they happen to be guerrillas.

And it's like, well, it's pretty relevant then about whether or not the Lion King has a guerrilla or not. If you're going to take them at their word, that that was the point. I think it's a pretty big hole in the spin. That's all I'm saying. Is that, no? No, you can't agree with you. I just think that even if it were completely innocuous and like, like, if we all went back now and we all had completely forgotten that, oh, wait, there actually is an ape at some point in the line king.

How would that like materially change anything about this? Andrew. Andrew, Andrew, the man is cooking. Get out of the way. We got Bob Woodward on here. How would it materially change it? It would go from racist gaslighting to just racism. Yeah, okay.

That's meaningful. That's true. That's a good point. I do think the gaslighting, the gaslighting matters because they, they, you can tell that they cannot abide even throwing the original meme creator under the bus, you know, like, because it's one of their guys. This whole right-wing ecosystem, like, you can never apologize for it. You can never

say anything and it was actually bad. The other thing, hold on the time. Have we discussed a couple of other questions? I'm going to, I want to bring a little order to this, because if they were to abide that he accidentally posted this, if they would say, oh, well, he didn't see him. It would raise the question of, like,

why is he up doing, posting anything at this hour? Like, what is he doing through the night? And so I do want to play, can we get the, the, the video ready because these are the this is the other shit that our president is posting at like and I want to be very precise here the dog video comes at 10 55 p.m. I'm watching industry. Okay. Like I'm doing normal shit at that hour. This the president is posting. Let's put the dog video up and play the dog whipped cream video. This is the shit he's posted. What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the

What was the other one? Wasn't there one more? There's one more. There's so many. The other, the tour pulled out is that one. And he just randomly posted a Bruce Lee video, which is like,

we'll play seven seconds of it or something. This is a 1056. Okay. I mean, Sam, I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm sorry to be pretty focused on the racism here.

Instead of grandpa posting, you post some, you post some questionable things. Not that. I've went to your Twitter. archive. So yeah, it's not great. It's not great that the president apparently has insomnia and maybe some light dementia and is posting like racist stuff and like random AI slop. Like, that's not great. Have you guys dug in? I'm sure you have, but maybe I could cook for a second

on the rest of the racist video. To me, I have the election shit. Yeah, the election shit. Yeah, to me this is the key thing. Because I like I saw Eager and Slack, you know, I just, I don't, I'd seen the screenshot I didn't notice from. And so I was like, I wonder what was the context of this. You go and click on the video that he posted, where you have the racist guerrilla stuff at the end. And the video is insane. The video is about Dominion again, Dominion, who Fox had to pay $800 million to. The video is about a theory that the machines had a hack where Trump was, when Trump reached a certain level,

then they shot up Biden at the end. Like that was the video he posted was that our voting machines were hacked. And then at the end of the video, it's like our voting machines were hacked. And oh, by the way, the first black president was a monkey. Like that was just like a little aside. Gorilla. Yeah. Right.

But like so my point is that, you know, even if the defense is he didn't see it, which isn't their defense, their defense is he saw it and he liked the Lion King name. But even if someone were to say he didn't see it, it's like the actual video he posted. that he wanted to post is extremely pernicious as far as you know you don't want the president posting that you can't trust voting machines like that's I would think that everybody could agree that there's some problems with that but I guess not yeah no no no god is the only one who's and Mike Mahler Mike Loller Mike Lola wasn't sure he wasn't sure maybe he hadn't seen maybe it was an accident it was kind of a fat finger retweet that that that theory doesn't really work for

Trump though because his fingers are so small this one was not you're going to retweet tweet. He himself, his account posted the video. It's not a re-truth, right? He had, some staffer had downloaded it and he fired it out. And both, I will say, both these Republicans, the two, all of two who have weighed in so far, and it's been 12 hours almost since he posted it. So Tim Scott and Michael Lawler are the two that we know who've weighed in, two prominent ones. Both of them have this, like, hilarious, very telling caveat in their statements where Tim Scott's like, I'm praying it was fake. it's like you know it wasn't fake you see it with your eyes and mike lawyer says whether intentional or a mistake they can't just acknowledge that this man did something wrong surely he had to have

been duped into something meanwhile the white house is saying of course he did it that's kind of similar to do you see the evangelical who posted that maybe trump didn't get a good briefing on what the prayer breakfast was supposed to be no i missed that what it what was this it's somebody briefed trump that this was a prayer breakfast. And it's like, yeah, it's right there in the name. Prayer Breakfast. It's the National Prayer Breakfast. Yeah. It's right there. They were trying to explain his comments yesterday and like, excuse me that way. I think Donald Trump maybe understands the National Prayer Breakfast as it's currently constituted a little bit more than that guy does. Yeah. Probably. I'm looking for more reactions online. I have this column of maga people on Twitter that I follow. No one's talking about on that. They're trying to ignore it as much as they can avoid.

I'm not seeing much from members of Congress otherwise. Can I just say there's a lot of sometimes defeatism and I've guys submit to this blackpilling nihilism. This doesn't matter. Who cares what Trump says? People have elected him twice. Like, that is, you know, there is some good reason to be blackpilled because I do think probably, I don't know, somewhere in the neighborhood of like 55 million Americans see that and they're like, hell yeah. And so that's pretty concerning. But like there's a meaningful segment of people that don't like to see Trump's overt racism.

Like there really is. And you saw this and, you know, people now there's like this looking back on the politics of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. There's kind of this conventional wisdom that that like backfired for the left because of the overreach and all that. And maybe it did eventually. But like in the moment, like part of the reason Biden won was that there was like, backlash among a certain demo of people that were like, I don't like this.

I don't want to feel like I live in a racist country where the president is a racist. And so I do think that it is not me. This isn't just cotton candy, I don't think. I think that as a layer on top of his other political problems, I don't think it helps. I want to believe you. I do.

I think there's probably a good bit of truth to that. But look, I mean, what was 2024, really? A large part of it was like, oh, we've gone so PC. We have to call people retards. All the minorities are getting all the benefits. And, you know, woe is the white man. Like, that was it. And I know this is an extreme example of racism, and that's not quite it.

But I do think, yeah, I think there's a good, like you said, I think there's a good chunk of people that are totally fine with this. And probably look at us as we yell and scream about, how racist this is and say, grow the fuck up. It's just a meme, you know, take a joke and shit like that. And I fear, honestly, that there's two very different conversations happening. And it can kind of be both, right? I mean, it can be the fact that on balance, this does not help Trump get to 51% of any given electorate, right? Like, I think that's, I'm totally with Tim on that, by the way. I think that America writ large does not like this. At the same time,

we're coming up on a decade plus of the most prominent guy on the. right, constantly training everyone who likes him in this in this song and dance of, actually it's not that bad. Actually, it's fine. Actually, you guys are the crazy ones for thinking it's bad. It poisons people's minds. Every, every new instance of it is like further moral training in like holding your nose and pretending that obviously bad things are fine and good. And that is actually like he continues to pump this sewage out into the public sphere and there are people who keep drinking it. I mean, let me give you another example of how this, how far we've come.

It's like, there's plenty of prominent people, Nazi, curious people on the right, who say horrifically racist things about Ushavans, right? And even the vice president doesn't speak out against those people, right? He does, he bites his tongue. And some of these people get audits. If really, really pushed on it, he'll be like, yeah, I don't think, I don't like McFentis that much. I don't think he's a great guy. Right.

But he would never proactively speak out. And I think, you know, I might be wrong. I hope I'm wrong. But I do think there's a part of the right wing officialdom that's been kind of conditioned to just say, this is who our voters are and we don't need to denounce it, nor should we, because we don't want to sever. or we don't want to cleavage our own voters against us. And that's a problem. When you have two lawmakers total,

one of them, the most prominent black lawmaker in Republican circles, and the other one, the most endangered moderate, if that's all you can get to say, this is wrong. And even then they are like, well,

maybe he did it accidentally. He did it by accident. Have we heard from his rankings of the top most racist things the White House has done so far? No, but do you have a, do you have a second or third? stuff on my head. I don't know, maybe you think about that.

I have some, there's some, also, I think it's important to tie this to direct policies. So, you know, we have what's about to happen in Springfield and what's already having Minneapolis and in Maine where they're going after people based on their accent based on black folks. Here's something from Carlos Espina, who had on FYI pod. He's a Latino influencer. He was going through the worst of the worst website. of the people that they, you know, that they claim that they've gotten an administration. And he noticed, he caught, he recognized somebody. Janon Villafara, who's a famous Colombian soccer player.

He was arrested in Columbia in 2020 and has been in custody for 11 years. He's never lived in the U.S. was not a migrant, was not captured. But they have him on their database to inflate the numbers. There's another story. What? Yeah. Jesus Christ. Not white guy, I would just say.

There's no story I talked about a little bit with French today, but I think it's relevant to this. Have you seen the story of Godfrey Wade? He's Jamaican. He's been here for 50 years. He was in the military for eight years under, you know, one of the, like kind of, there are some programs you can serve in the military, even if you're not a citizen. He never got full citizenship. He was detained by ICE.

For five months, he's been an ICE detention. they're sending them back to Jamaica this week today. He's been here for 50 years and he served in the military. We kept him in detention for five months. How did he stay there for five months? I've always been curious about this. Does he not get a hearing? Under what grounds are we detaining him for five months?

Yeah, they're really backed up. This ties to the, I don't know how to pronounce it, Julie Lee, Lee, yeah, from Minnesota. I mean, that's story. She's like the Minnesota judge was basically saying, you know, the, the courts have told them to release, like there are a couple dozen people and they haven't done it. And they are in contempt of court in violation. And so some of this is cruelty is a point stop. Some of this is just backlog.

Like they don't have, they still don't have the like, you know, the arms and legs to do what they want. Yeah. And so some of this is that. Some of that's incompetence. yeah yeah all right

well I got nothing else to add on this stupid fucking racist Lion King thing Andrew anything you want to end I think we hit I think we hit it Andrew has a text chain going how's your MAGA text chain you're on a couple of mega text chains anything firing up this morning

nobody nobody's talking about this one is talking about this one I don't have I've been logged in we'll keep an eye out for it all right good to see you guys Hey, Tim, thanks what hopping on.

I appreciate that. Thank you. And I really appreciate Andrew holding our feet to the fire about the actual animals in the Lion King. They're different, it turns out. And I really, what I really appreciate is Tim coming in hot saying, you know, there's no fucking guerrillas. Oh, man. Okay. Thank you guys.

Appreciate it. Hey, for those who have watched, thank you. I was really enraged by this. I hope I didn't swear too much. But, you know, sometimes you got to get mad at shit. And you can get that at the Bullwark. So become a subscriber. Follow Andrew Eger on Morningshots,

follow Tim and his pod. One of the best pods in the business. Follow us at Bullwark takes to subscribe. Well, you're not quite at number one in the rankings. Well, something to aspire to. On the rankings, is McDonald's have the best burgers in the market

just because it has the most sales? I don't think so. I think there are better burgers out there. We've got to give you something to aspire to, okay, buddy? All right. Take care, guys. I'll talk to you later.