Did Trump really share a post depicting the Obamas as apes?

"President Trump posted a blatantly racist video clip portraying former President Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama as apes, but he insisted he had nothing to apologize for even after he deleted the video following an outcry."

So proclaimed the New York Times on February 7, 2026. Predictably, many other news outlets reported the same thing:

• CNN, Feb. 7, 2026: "Trump won’t apologize for sharing since-deleted racist video depicting Obamas as apes on Truth Social"
• NBC News, Feb. 7, 2026: "Trump says he won't apologize for racist post depicting the Obamas as apes"
• The Atlantic, Feb, 6, 2026: "The Obama Meme on Trump’s Truth Social Was Exactly What It Looked Like"

Just look at the above screenshot. Sounds like a cut-and-dry case, right?

Wrong.

As Anthony Brian Logan documented on his YouTube channel on February 6, 2026, Trump did nothing of the sort. He did not post a video depicting the Obamas as primates. What he did do was post a sixty-second video on his Truth Social account, in which he repeated accusations he has made in the past about voter fraud in the 2020 election (as a Trump supporter, I wish he would stop with these accusations, but that is completely unrelated to the Obamas-as-apes clip). As Logan clearly shows, at the end of the voter-fraud video, the video auto-scrolls to the next video, whose first scene does, in fact, depict the Obamas as apes/monkeys, as part of a longer video depicting Trump as the Lion King, with many of his political critics depicted as other jungle animals. (If the Obamas had been swapped with Adam Schiff [a giraffe] and J.B. Pritzker [an elephant], we would not be having this conversation.) But the jungle video had nothing to do with the Truth Social post's video. It was the result of sloppy editing by whichever Trump staffer posted the voter-fraud video. (See here for the complete Truth Social post video, as well as the complete Obamas-as-primates video.)

For any of my readers who has ever seen a video clip on YouTube Shorts, Instagram, or TikTok, you know if auto-scroll is enabled, then when you finish watching the video you clicked on, it automatically goes to another video. And it was at that point, when the two-second clip from the next, completely unconnected video automatically loaded, that the critics screenshot the Truth Social account.

Nothing I have said here means I approve of the Obamas being depicted as primates.

I don't. I hate racism.

Whether or not one believes in the literal depiction of Creation as described in Genesis 1 & 2, with all of humanity being produced by one couple, one of the messages of that story is this: All human beings are equal, since we are descended from the same original couple. No race is greater than another race, since Adam and Eve's race is unknown, and completely irrelevant.

Racism will always exist, that's just the human condition. It's disgusting, but it's reality. But lying about a non-racist incident (even about a person whom you strongly detest) helps no one. It just makes it more difficult to fight real incidents of racism.