Bill Maher slams Trump ‘hypocrites’ for ‘lame’ excuses about racist clip depicting Obamas as apes

Bill Maher ripped into the Trump administration on Real Time Friday for their “lame” defense of a racist post shared on the president’s Truth Social account depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

The video showed the former president and first lady’s faces superimposed onto apes in a jungle, swaying side to side and smiling as the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” played in the background.

Trump has since refused to apologize for sharing the video, which was later deleted, claiming he only watched part of it and blaming his staff.

“Trump did a Roseanne,” Maher said Friday, referencing comedian Roseanne Barr, whose infamous tweet about former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett led to the cancellation of her sitcom Roseanne in 2018.

“The defense, I thought, from the administration, was rather lame. They said, ‘He did not mean to hit share. He meant to hit like,’” Maher joked.

open image in gallery

open image in gallery

Barr blamed her erratic tweets on the sleep medication Ambien before apologizing.

“Karoline Leavitt, she’s his very loyal press spokesperson, she said the president was just reposting a meme of him as the king of the jungle, with Democrats as characters from The Lion King, as world leaders do,” Maher said.

“Of course, there are two things a little wrong with this one: there are no apes in The Lion King. Two, if it’s a cartoon character, it’s OK? That’s a rule now?”

“So it’s OK if somebody made a cartoon of Elmer Fudd shooting Charlie Kirk, that would be OK, you f***ing hypocrites?”

Kirk was an American conservative activist and co-founder of Turning Point USA. He was fatally shot and killed at an outdoor campus event at Utah Valley University on September 10 last year.

During a press gaggle Friday night on Air Force One, reporters asked Trump about the post, where he insisted that he was the “least racist president you’ve had in a long time.”

When a reporter asked him about calls from other Republicans to apologize for the video, Trump refused to take responsibility.

“No, I didn't make a mistake. I mean, if I look at a lot of thousands of things, I looked at the beginning of it. It was fine,” Trump said.

South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, a Republican and one of Trump’s most loyal supporters, said he was “praying it was fake.”

“It's the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it,” Scott, who is Black, said in a post on X before the video was deleted.

Senator Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi, said in an X post that Trump “should take it down and apologize.”

Trump was asked directly if he condemns the racist parts of the video, to which the president replied: “Of course I do.”

When asked if he had any message for the Americans who were offended by the video, Trump said “I really have no message,” before insisting that the U.S. is the “hottest country anywhere in the world” right now.

The Obamas typically ignore Trump’s attacks.

But during a Democratic National Convention speech in 2024, Michelle Obama made a rare acknowledgement of Trump’s comments.

“For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us,” she said. “See, his limited and narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard-working, highly educated, successful people who happened to be Black.”