The White House has said that a post on President Donald Trump's social media account sharing a racist video depicting Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as monkeys was made in error by a staff member, and has been removed.
"A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down," a White House official told AFP.
Mr Trump's spokeswoman had dismissed "fake outrage" over the post.
Earlier Mr Trump triggered outrage after he posted the video.
Top Democrats condemned the post as "racist," even as the White House rejected what it called "fake outrage" and said the video posted late yesterday on Mr Trump's Truth Social account was from an "internet meme".
Near the end of the one-minute-long video promoting conspiracies about Republican Mr 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" played in the background when the Obamas appeared.
The video repeated false allegations that ballot-counting company Dominion Voting Systems helped steal the 2020 election from Mr Trump and hand victory to Joe Biden, who was Mr 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 earlier in a statement to AFP.
"Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public," added Ms Leavitt.
As of early this morning, the video had been liked several thousand times on the president's social media platform.
The office of California Governor Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate and a prominent Trump critic, slammed the post.
"Disgusting behavior by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this. Now," Mr Newsom's press office account posted on X.
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.
Tim Scott, the only Black senator in the US Republican Party, called the video "the most racist thing I've seen out of this White House".
Mr Scott said he was "praying it was fake" and called for Mr Trump to remove it.
'Birther' conspiracy
Mr Obama is the only Black president in American history and backed Mr Trump's opponent Kamala Harris on the campaign trail in the 2024 presidential election.
Mr Trump launched his own political career by pushing the racist and false "birther" conspiracy theory that his Democratic predecessor was lying about being born in the United States.
Mr Trump has long had a bitter rivalry with Mr Obama, who was president from 2009 to 2017, taking particular umbrage at the Democrat's popularity and the fact that he won the Nobel peace prize.
In the first year of his second term in the White House, Mr Trump has ramped up his use of hyper-realistic but fabricated AI visuals on Truth Social and other platforms, often glorifying himself while lampooning his critics.
He has used the provocative posts to rally his conservative base.
Last year, Mr 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.
Later, he posted an AI clip of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries - who is Black - wearing a fake mustache and a sombrero. Mr Jeffries called the image racist.
Since returning to the White House, Mr Trump has drawn criticism from his opponents for leading a crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.
One of Mr Trump's first acts was to terminate all federal government DEI programs, including related policies in the military.
The drive to rid the armed forces of what Mr Trump has derided as "woke" initiatives has also seen the removal from some military academy bookshelves of scores of books that cover the US history of racial discrimination.
US federal anti-discrimination programs were born of the 1960s civil rights struggle, mainly led by Black Americans, for equality and justice after hundreds of years of slavery, whose abolition in 1865 saw other institutional forms of racism enforced.
