Daily Wire host on a meme Trump posted showing the Obamas as monkeys: “In context, the original video itself is actually not even racist”
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From the February 10, 2026, edition of The Daily Wire's The Michael Knowles Show
MICHAEL KNOWLES (HOST): You know, it's not really tasteful to put Black people's faces on monkeys. I certainly agree with that. So I don't think he did this intentionally. I don't think he posted this. He obviously thought it was distasteful because he took the video down when he even got to the very end, if he got to the end the first time he saw it. But I said, let me go back to the original video, not the voting machine one. I'm talking about that one that autoplayed there at the end. I just -- I'm even skeptical that that video is racist. Not because of putting Black people's faces on monkeys, but I'm skeptical of it because the libs have been lying about everything when it comes to Trump. So you know what? Let me just go back. I found the original video. Here's the original video. I'll describe it to you if you're only listening.
So we've got Barack and Michelle, and their heads are on monkeys. OK. OK. It's a little distasteful, I think I would say. And then there's Hillary's like a warthog, and then Hakeem is there. AOC is a donkey as is Newsom. Pritzker is an elephant. Zohran is a leopard. Oh, hold up. Pause it. Pause it. There's the key. Joe Biden is a monkey. So if this video, which is just all the Democrats looking like animals, and then the punchline is Trump comes in as the lion, and they say, you know, the lion sleeps tonight. He's the lion, and they're all a bunch of animals. But if it were only Black people as monkeys, I might be able to understand the outrage a little bit. So, you know, it's kind of distasteful, isn't it? But that's not what happened. Because here you have Joe Biden, vice president to Barack Obama, and then the Democrat president who followed him as a monkey. Furthermore, in that very image, you got Joe Biden as a monkey eating a banana, and then you've got Kamala as a turtle. Now Kamala, I'm reliably informed, is a Black woman of color. So if this were a racist thing, Kamala would be the monkey, and I guess Biden would be the turtle. And it would actually make more sense for Biden to be the turtle because Joe Biden's really slow, and he's, like, 200 years old.
So the craziest part about this -- and I haven't really seen people talking about this, is yeah, OK, it's -- yes. It's distasteful to put Black people's faces on monkeys. Sure. Fair enough. Trump clearly didn't intend to do that. He almost certainly didn't even see that. He might not have posted the video himself, very likely did not. He's got other things on his plate. And, you know, posting a video is a little more complicated than just sending out a tweet with a, you know, a few lines that you type yourself. But beyond that, what everyone seems to agree on, including the conservatives is, but the original video in context is racist. And the fact is, it's not. In context, the original video itself is actually not even racist. In order for the original video to be racist, it would have to be the Black people as monkeys and the non-Black people as not monkeys. But that's not what happened. You get Biden as the monkey, and then to prove it, you get Biden and a Black person in the very same frame, and the white person is the monkey and the non-white person is the turtle.
A hoax through and through, and I don't — it's crazy. I haven't even seen anyone defend that. Look. It's -- obviously, Trump regretted posting it because he took the video down. But I don't wanna hear -- I've been seeing some conservatives saying, well, obviously, the original video is racist. It's actually not in its original context. You could say that making Black people look like monkeys is racial and cruel or whatever. But in the context of the video, it's actually not. You don't even need to give libs that much. It is thoroughly, entirely, 100% grade a, USDA certified, a hoax.