Name: 'Didn't make a mistake': Trump won't apologize for sharing racist video
Uploaded: 2026-02-07T17:06:01.000Z
Duration: 8 min 41 s
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Adverbs of degree

I looked at the first part and it was really about voter fraud in and the machines, how crooked it is, how disgusting it is.

Adverbs of manner

A number of Republicans are calling on you to apologize for that post.

It had been up for nearly 12 hours, but he did remove it.

And I want to warn before we show it to you, that it is racist and offensive.

But it's important to show because this was posted on the official account of the President of the United States.

You can see here the faces of the Obamas put onto bodies of apes.

And his decision to take the post down came after the White House initially doubled down on the post itself.

The press secretary, Caroline Levitt, saying, quote, this is from an Internet meme video depicting President Trump as the king of the jungle and the Democrats as characters from the Lion King.

Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.

Well, that was said, but then the backlash got loud.

Republican Senator Tim Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate, came out calling it the most racist thing out of this White House.

Said Herndon and Andrew Yang are out front now.

But it takes them 12 hours to take this down.

At first, they say owning exactly what it was not trying to say.

And I didn't see the part about the apes.

They actually owned the whole part about the apes and then still took it down.

The initial response was to defend it, as it always is with the Trump White House.

And then after the blowback started, we have seen these kind of further retractions.

I mean, when I saw this this morning, it is both shocking and not shocking at the same time.

Like at one, you have the reality of the President, United States, engaging in offensive racist behavior, but

you also have a president who has had his whole political rise tied to those very same things.

I mean, the origin story of Donald Trump is a racist conspiracy about Barack Obama.

So, I mean, we cannot extract Donald Trump from the trail of racism that he has left or encouraged.

But I think this reflects a White House that is increasingly at a credibility loss, too.

They are putting their officials out there, Caroline Levitt included.

And whether it's Minneapolis or whether it's Trump's health or whether it's this video, they're increasingly asking the public to not believe what's in front of them.

And I think that has contributed to Donald Trump's increasing unpopularity with the electorate.

So, you know, Andrew, the White House, obviously now trying to blame it on a White House staffer.

Which, I mean, there's just, there's so much irony in that.

You could take the Rob Reiner post, you could take so many posts that they actually haven't even tried to blame on a staffer.

He goes ahead and posts his own stuff that I don't know anybody thought was okay in this case.

Trump allies are calling to fire the staffer.

Bill O'Reilly said, you got to fire the staffer right away.

Pastor Mark Burns, after speaking with Trump, says, my recommendation to the President was direct and firm.

The staffer should be fired immediately and the president should publicly condemn this action, which he didn't do.

But a source familiar with Trump's social media, as I said with Rob Reiner, he posts on Truth Social all the time by himself.

He posts in the middle of the night by himself.

So suddenly, in this case, it's not this one.

Somehow upset enough people that he's going to put the fig leaf up.

The backlash was truly bipartisan, which is something of a rarity in today's politics.

Aside from how vile and disgusting the video was, the first thing that came to mind for me was distraction because the actions of ICE in Minneapolis, wildly unpopular even with many people who voted for Donald Trump.

This week, a job report came out saying that it was a worst.

It was the worst January for people looking for jobs since 2009.

And so I thought to myself, okay, this is Trump throwing something out there to change the news cycle.

I mean, I think there has been speculation that he does done that before.

We know that that's his instinct, is to, like, get the term, get it back on his terms.

I just think even as they lurch at some of their more familiar topics, be it social stuff or driving what they used to call wokeness or fighting against, that, this isn't that.

And so I'm saying, even egregious miscarriage, even as they try to draw Democrats into culture wars, I think they have miscalculated the moments in which Donald Trump goes way beyond that.

I mean, the Rob Reiner post Didn't get this much from Republican senators.

And you had administration allies coming out and saying, fire this guy.

Joining me now is Harvard University professor and former NAAC President Cornell William Brooks.

Professor, the President is saying, in furtherance of a lie about voter fraud in Georgia, of which there was not, which is just something he endlessly repeats, like a guy in a bar late at night, he posted or approved the posting of this.

What do you make of his explanation and how the White House has kind of come up with various explanations throughout the day?

Well, first of all, thank you for having me.

What I make of the President's explanation is that it is neither an explanation nor an excuse.

We have seen from this White House shifting narratives, the President taking responsibility for posting that which the White House denied and that is subsequently attributed to a young staffer.

So in other words, we have shifting narratives, apparent lies, and

the President taking, not taking responsibility for his actions and the consequences of it.

Anderson, we need to really be clear here.

The President was drawing from a deep toxic well of racist tropes going back to at least the 1850s with scientific racism, this notion that black people are most closely related to apes and guerrillas and simians, such that they are subhuman and subcitizens.

And since this president has called into question President Obama's birthplace and his legitimacy, credibility as a citizen, this is true to form.

So in other words, this is incredibly offensive.

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'Didn't make a mistake': Trump won't apologize for sharing racist video

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