Trump accusé de racisme après avoir diffusé une vidéo des Obama en singes
"Racist", "scavenger", "despicable": condemnations poured in Friday in the United States after Donald Trump published on his Truth Social platform a conspiracy video montage in which Barack and Michelle Obama are depicted as monkeys.
The White House denounced it as "false outrage".
The video, just over a minute long, presents alleged evidence of manipulation of the 2020 election, which the Republican president insists he won against all evidence.
At the end, a montage of the Obamas appears very quickly, their faces laughing on a primate's body, with the jungle in the background.
"Donald Trump is a pernicious, vile, and deranged scavenger," reacted the leader of the Democratic minority in the US Congress, Hakeem Jeffries, on X. The African-American elected official called on Republicans to "denounce the repugnant intolerance" of their leader.
In the conservative camp, where criticism of the American president is generally non-existent or very muted, Senator Tim Scott asked Donald Trump to "remove" the video.
- "The most racist thing" -
"I pray this is false, because this is the most racist thing I have seen come out of this White House," the only black Republican senator wrote on X.
By Friday morning, the video had received several thousand "likes" on Truth Social but also a number of furious comments.
The image was originally posted by the far-right American website Patriot News Outlet, and republished twice by Donald Trump.
He repeats allegations, never proven, that the vote-counting company Dominion Voting Systems participated in a large-scale smear campaign to bring Joe Biden to the White House in 2020 at the expense of Donald Trump.
Democratic Governor of California Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential candidate and fierce opponent of Donald
Trump denounced the "despicable behavior".
Democratic congressman Herb Conaway said, "Trump is a vile, racist old man."
The White House reacted, true to its offensive communication strategy, which consists of defending or amplifying the president's messages, without ever admitting any mistake or expressing regrets.
"This is taken from a video posted online depicting President Trump as the king of the jungle, and the Democrats as characters from 'The Lion King'. Stop this fake outrage and account for something that, today, means something to the American public," said the US president's spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, in a statement sent to AFP.
- Trump as "king of the jungle" -
The video that Karoline Leavitt refers to is an animated cartoon created by the pro-Trump account @xerias_x. It shows several Democratic figures, such as Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, in a savannah setting, with Donald Trump depicted as a lion.
But the conspiracy video about election fraud released by the American president only uses a very short excerpt from this cartoon, the one that shows the Obamas as primates.
During the first year of his second term in the White House, Donald Trump intensified his use of outrageous visuals to glorify himself or ridicule his detractors.
He also harbors a particular animosity towards Barack Obama. Last year, he published an AI-generated video showing the first Black president of the United States being arrested in the Oval Office and then appearing behind bars in an orange prison jumpsuit.
He accuses him of "treason" for an alleged involvement in a "conspiracy" surrounding the 2016 presidential election.
The Trump administration is waging an open battle against "woke" ideology, a term used pejoratively by conservatives to denounce what they perceive as excessive activism in favor of minorities.
The head of state has launched a large-scale expulsion policy of undocumented immigrants and is openly playing on the fears of a segment of his white electorate of losing their political and cultural power.
Commentaires (6)
Participer à la Discussion
Règles de la communauté :
💡 Astuce : Utilisez des emojis depuis votre téléphone ou le module emoji ci-dessous. Cliquez sur GIF pour ajouter un GIF animé. Collez un lien X/Twitter ou TikTok pour l'afficher automatiquement.