Staff Reports
President Trump’s late-night post that briefly included a clip showing Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces superimposed onto apes set off predictable outrage across the political class, and the video was taken down about twelve hours after it went up. The episode has been widely reported as occurring on Feb. 5–6, 2026, and it left both the White House and the media scrambling to explain what happened.
The White House initially defended the material as an internet meme and later said a staffer had “erroneously” shared the clip, while the president himself told reporters he hadn’t watched the entire minute-long post before it was uploaded. That shifting explanation matters, but it does not automatically prove malicious intent — social media misposts happen, especially when staffers and rapid posting are involved.
Still, the outrage was bipartisan, and Republican Sen. Tim Scott publicly called the clip the most racist thing he’d seen out of the administration, demanding its removal and an apology. Democrats seized the moment as expected, weaponizing a brief two-second image into a full-scale character assassination against the president and anyone who offers him a defense.
It’s worth noting the factual timeline: fact-checkers have shown the offensive image appeared at the very end of a longer, conspiracy-laden video about the 2020 election, and some defenders argue the snippet was an autoplayed segment pulled in from another account. Those technical realities don’t erase the offense, but they do undercut the claim that a deliberate racial attack was clearly and obviously ordered by the president himself.
Conservative readers should be furious at the spectacle of moral grandstanding by the same media outlets that normalized far worse depictions when it served their narrative, and who now demand instant perfunctory apologies rather than substantive discussion about election integrity or national priorities. The left’s reflex is to weaponize outrage and distract from issues like the border, inflation, and an increasingly aggressive foreign policy, and Americans deserve better than manufactured moral panics.
We should demand accountability where it’s due — if a staffer broke protocol, discipline them and fix the process — and we should also refuse to be led into the media’s outrage treadmill. Stand for results, not tantrums; focus on preserving the gains conservatives have fought for, and don’t let a viral meme derail the real work of securing our country and restoring common-sense governance.
