US President Donald Trump has triggered outrage after he posted a video depicting Barack Obama, the first Black president in American history, and his wife Michelle as monkeys.
A top Democrat called Trump "vile" while even a senior Republican senator said the video posted late on Thursday on the president's own Truth Social account was “blatantly racist”.
The White House, however, rejected what it called "fake outrage" and said the video was from an "internet meme."
Near the end of the one-minute-long video about Trump's 2020 election loss, the Obamas are shown with their faces on the bodies of monkeys for about one second.
The song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" plays in the background when the Obamas appear.
The video repeats allegations that ballot-counting company Dominion Voting Systems helped steal the 2020 election from Trump and hand victory to Joe Biden, who was Obama's vice president at the time.
"This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King," White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to AFP.
"Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public," added Leavitt.
There was no immediate reaction from the Obamas.
But the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, called Trump "vile, unhinged and malignant" and a "sick individual."
"Every single Republican must immediately denounce Donald Trump's disgusting bigotry," Jeffries posted on X.
There was one unusually strong expression of outrage from Trump's own party.
Tim Scott, the only Black Republican senator and a contender for the 2024 presidential nomination, called the video "the most racist thing I've seen out of this White House."
Scott said he was "praying it was fake" and called for Trump to remove it.
The office of California Governor Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate and a prominent Trump critic, slammed "disgusting behavior."
'Stain on our history'
Ben Rhodes, a former top national security advisor and close confidant to Barack Obama, also condemned the imagery.
"Let it haunt Trump and his racist followers that future Americans will embrace the Obamas as beloved figures while studying him as a stain on our history," he wrote on X.
Following outrage, the overtly “racist” video clip of the Obamas was taken down from the US President’s Truth Social feed on Friday.
Trump has long had a bitter rivalry with Obama, who was president from 2009 to 2017.
In the first year of his second term in the White House, Trump has ramped up his use of hyper-realistic AI visuals on Truth Social and other platforms, often lampooning his critics.
Last year, Trump posted a video generated by artificial intelligence showing Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office and appearing behind bars in an orange jumpsuit.
