Trump says he approved sharing video with racist images of Obamas but claims he didn’t see part ‘that people don’t like’ – as it happened

This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the week, but we will be back on Monday. Here are the latest developments:

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  Donald Trump told reporters that he did direct aides to post a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes on his social media platform, but claimed to have not seen that part of the 62-second clip.

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  While video posted on social media captured the booing of JD Vance, the US vice-president, at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan, the crowd reaction to his presence was not heard or remarked upon in the US TV coverage streamed live on Peacock, the NBC Sports platform.

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  After the president claimed that the suggestion to rename New York’s Penn Station Trump Station had not come from him but Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, Schumer called that an “absolute lie.”

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  A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration cannot continue withholding funds for a vital infrastructure project from New York and New Jersey. Trump has reportedly frozen the funds as leverage in his attempt to get Schumer’s support for naming both Penn Station and Washington’s Duller Airport after himself.

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  Pete Hegseth, the former Fox weekend host now serving as US defense secretary, announced that the Pentagon would no longer send active-duty service members to Harvard, denouncing his alma mater as “woke”.

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At an asylum hearing in Minneapolis on Friday, the family of Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old whose detention by immigration agents focused outrage over the administration’s effort to deport even non-violent asylum seekers, was given more time to make their case, Kristen Stenvik, superintendent of Columbia Heights Public Schools, where Liam goes to school told MS NOW.

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A lawyer for the family, Paschal Nwokocha, told Minnesota Public Radio: “the government was bent on removing this family from the United States. We were able to get additional time to do what we need to do in court.”

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The federal government had filed a motion Wednesday seeking to end asylum claims for the family. The 5-year-old had just returned home this week after he was detained with his father on 20 January and sent to a detention center in Texas.

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A New York federal judge on Friday unfroze funds withheld by Donald Trump for a $16 billion project to overhaul critical rail infrastructure in New York and New Jersey, Reuters reports.

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The Gateway Project will build a new commuter rail tunnel between Manhattan and New Jersey and repair a century-old tunnel used by more than 200,000 travelers and 425 trains daily. The existing Hudson Tunnel was heavily damaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and needs frequent emergency repairs that disrupt travel on the nation’s most heavily used passenger rail line.

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US district judge Jeannette Vargas in Manhattan handed down the temporary order hours after New York and New Jersey said construction would halt for lack of funding.

n New Jersey’s acting attorney general, Jennifer Davenport, and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, issued statements praising the ruling.

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“The Trump Administration must drop this campaign of political retribution immediately and must allow work on this vital infrastructure project to continue,” Davenport said.

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“We won a court order and blocked the Trump administration from freezing funding for the Hudson Tunnel Project,” James said. “We will continue our lawsuit and fight to protect our good-paying union jobs and ensure one of the most important infrastructure projects in the nation can resume.”

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The states said in a January lawsuit that Trump’s administration had frozen the funds in a “brazen act of political retribution” against their Democratic leaders.

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The Trump administration has withheld $205 million in reimbursements for the project since October 1. In a move that echoed Trump’s 2019 attempt to extract “a favor” from Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in return for unfreezing funds for weapons, which led to his first impeachment, Trump has reportedly demanded that Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Senate’s Democrats, agree to rename both Washington Dulles Airport and New York’s Penn Station after him in exchange for unfreezing the funds.

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On his flight to Florida Friday night, Donald Trump was asked about reports that he told the Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, that he would unfreeze funds for a major infrastructure project in New York if he supports renaming Penn Station after him.

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“Chuck Schumer suggested that to me,” Trump claimed, “about changing the name of Penn Station to Trump Station.”

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“Absolute lie,” Schumer fired back on social media. “He knows it. Everyone knows it. Only one man can restart the project and he can restart it with the snap of his fingers.”

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Donald Trump admitted on Friday night that he did direct aides to post a racist video on his social media account that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, but claimed that he did not see that part of the video, which was near the end of a 62-second clip that otherwise repeated conspiracy theories about his 2020 election loss.

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Although the White House initially defended the video in a statement from the press secretary, the clip was later deleted and reporters were told that it had been posted, without the president’s knowledge, by an aide.

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Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump undercut those efforts by his aides to explain away his own behavior, telling reporters that he did approve posting the video. “I looked at it, I saw it and I just looked at the first part,” the president said. “I didn’t see the whole thing; I guess during the end of it there was some kind of a picture that people don’t like. I wouldn’t like it either. But I didn’t see it, I just, I looked at the first part … then I gave it to the people. Generally they look at the whole thing, but I guess somebody didn’t and they posted – and we took it down.”

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Asked whether he would apologize, as even Republican officials have suggested he should, Trump bristled. “No, I didn’t make a mistake,” the president who approved the posting of a racist meme on his social media account said. “I mean you give, I look at a lot of, thousands of things,” he added, apparently suggesting that his posts, which are official statements from the president of the United States, are not something he takes much care about.

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Trump then went on to offer a version of the explanation his press secretary had given earlier in the day, when she suggested that the meme was a harmless reference to the Lion King. “But nobody knew that was at the end,” Trump added, in reference to what was, again, a clip that lasted just over one minute. “Certainly if they had looked, they would’ve seen it, and probably they would’ve had the sense to take it down.”

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Trump’s claim that the clip was taken down as soon as the racist depiction of the Obamas was discovered is untrue, given that the post remained up for hours after Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, attempted to brush off the outrage.

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“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” Leavitt said in a statement on Friday morning. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

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Hours passed between that dismissive statement and the removal of the video from the president’s social media platform.

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The president did not say who had posted the video, but Natalie Harp, an aide to Trump, and a former anchor for the conspiratorial One America News, reportedly has access to the president’s Truth Social account.

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“I am, by the way, the least racist president you’ve had in a long time,” Trump told another reporter who pressed him on whether posting a racist video was a wise political move.

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Pete Hegseth, the former Fox weekend host now serving as US defense secretary, announced in a video statement on Friday that the Pentagon is “discontinuing all graduate-level professional military education, PME, all fellowships, and certificate programs between Harvard University and the war department for active-duty service members”.

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Hegseth, who made no mention of the master’s in public policy he earned from Harvard’s John F Kennedy School of Government, attacked the university as “one of the red-hot centers of Hate America activism”.

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“Too many faculty members openly loathe our military; they cast our armed forces in. a negative light and squelch anyone who challenges their leftist political leanings,” he said.

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“University leadership encouraged a campus environment that celebrated Hamas, allowed attacks on Jews, and still promotes discrimination based on race in violation of supreme court decisions,” he claimed. “DEI was literally founded at Harvard.”

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“With some exceptions,” Hegseth added, “the Ivy League as a whole has pervasive institutional bias and a lack of viewpoint diversity, including the coddling of toxic ideologies that undercuts our mission.”

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“That is why, in two weeks’ time, components of all of our departments – army, navy and air force – will evaluate all existing graduate programs for active-duty service members at all Ivy League universities and other civilian universities,” he added.

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“The goal is to determine whether or not they actually deliver cost-effective, strategic education for future senior leaders.”

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The Pentagon’s focus on “building lethality”, Hegseth also said, “no longer includes spending millions of dollars on expensive universities that actively undercut our mission and undercut our country. We train warriors, not wokesters.”

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The Harvard alumni ended his video message with: “Harvard: good riddance.”

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While Hegseth made no explicit reference to his own time at Harvard, the intended audience for his remarks, Fox News viewers, including Viewer Number One in the White House, likely understood what he meant by the cryptic aside “I know it well” when he first mentioned the school.

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That’s because Hegseth’s attack on Harvard has been a theme of his political rhetoric in books and on television for years. He disparaged the school in two of his books, and, in a live segment of the morning show Fox & Friends in 2022, Hegseth made a show of defacing his diploma and writing “Return to sender” on it in large letters.

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During the same broadcast, Hegseth acknowledged that he was not really “returning” his degree: “People will say, ‘This is just a stunt, you still have a degree’. And that’s fine, I went; I got the degree; I walked; took the classes and all that.”

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While video posted on social media captured the booing of JD Vance, the US vice-president, at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan, the crowd reaction to his presence was not heard or remarked upon in the US TV coverage streamed live on Peacock, the NBC Sports platform.

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“As the United States team, led by the speedskater Erin Jackson, made its way across the stadium it was loudly applauded,” the Guardian’s Sean Ingle reported from the San Siro in Milan. “But then the TV cameras panned to the US vice-president, JD Vance, and his wife, Usha, and the cheers turned to loud boos.

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“The boos were picked up on the broadcast, too,” the Toronto Star columnist Bruce Arthur noted, referring to the Canadian broadcaster CBC’s coverage of the moment, which featured one commentator saying: “There is the vice-president JD Vance and his wife Usha – oop, those are not … uh … those are a lot of boos for him. Whistling, jeering, some applause.”

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The NBC live stream seen by Americans, however, skipped over the moment. The booing of Vance, when he appeared on screens inside the stadium during the entry of Team USA, was also not audible, or mentioned in a clip of the moment posted on YouTube by the broadcaster.

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On social media, the White House shared a clip of the US team’s entrance, and Vance applauding, from the boo-less NBC broadcast.

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Other journalists inside the stadium confirmed the unusual booing during the ceremony.

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“It’s very rare to hear boos at an Olympic opening ceremony,” the USA Today correspondent Christine Brennan reported from Italy. “In my 22 Olympics it probably has happened but I sure don’t remember it. Vice President JD Vance just got booed when he appeared on the big screen. The US athletes, on the other hand, received loud cheers.”

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The BBC Sport live blogger heard the boos. “The USA team got huge cheers as they entered the arena,” Emma Smith reported from the stadium for the BBC. “Those cheers turned quickly to boos when American vice president JD Vance appeared on the big screen. He is at the stadium tonight with wife Usha.”

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Arthur noted that Vance was not alone in being booed. “Israel was definitely booed,” the columnist noted on the Star’s live blog. “ Not universally, but there were more boos than cheers in the Milan stadium for the four Israeli athletes who marched.”

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Bill Clinton, the former president, renewed his call for the full release of files from the federal investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender, and demanded that his testimony to Congress on his relationship with Epstein be made in a public hearing, not behind closed doors.

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“I have called for the full release of the Epstein files. I have provided a sworn statement of what I know. And just this week, I’ve agreed to appear in person before the committee. But it’s still not enough for Republicans on the House Oversight Committee,” Clinton said in a statement.

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“Now, Chairman Comer says he wants cameras, but only behind closed doors. Who benefits from this arrangement? It’s not Epstein’s victims, who deserve justice. Not the public, who deserve the truth. It serves only partisan interests. This is not fact-finding, it’s pure politics,” he added. “I will not sit idly as they use me as a prop in a closed-door kangaroo court by a Republican Party running scared. If they want answers, let’s stop the games & do this the right way: in a public hearing, where the American people can see for themselves what this is really about.”

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The former president’s spokesman has said that he used Epstein’s private jet on four trips in 2002 and 2003 – visiting Europe, Asia and Africa “in connection with the work of the Clinton Foundation” – but denied ever visiting Epstein private island and claimed he had no contact with him after he was first charged with sex crimes.

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Bill Clinton’s statement on Friday seconded a call made by his wife, the former first lady and US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, on Thursday, when she accused James Comer, the Republican chair of the House oversight committee, of playing “games”, by demanding testimony from both Clintons, but behind closed doors. “You love to talk about transparency,” Hillary Clinton told Comer on social media. “There’s nothing more transparent than a public hearing, cameras on.”

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  Following intense backlash from Democrats and Republicans, the White House has now taken down Trump’s Truth Social repost of a racist video, depicting the Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. Earlier, press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to brush off the outrage, defending Trump’s repost as “an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King”.

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  Indirect talks between Iran and the US on the future of Iran’s nuclear programme ended on Friday with a broad agreement to maintain a diplomatic path, possibly with further talks in the coming days, according to statements from Iran and the Omani hosts. The relieved Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, described the eight hours of meetings as a “good start” conducted in a good atmosphere. The US team was led by Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, and the US president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

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  Donald Trump has told the Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, that he will unfreeze funds for major infrastructure projects in New York City if he supports renaming Dulles international airport and Penn Station after him. The demand, which was first reported on Thursday by Punchbowl News, comes after the president in October halted $18bn in funding for a major subway line expansion in New York City as well as a new rail tunnel connecting the city to New Jersey.

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  The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, announced today that officials arrested one of the “key participants” in the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack that killed four US government officials, including the US ambassador to Libya, J Christopher Stevens. Bondi said suspect Zubayar al-Bakoush was taken into custody at 3am ET on Friday. “We will prosecute this alleged terrorist to the fullest extent of the law. He’ll face charges related to murder, terrorism, arson, among others,” Bondi told reporters today.

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Earlier today, the Department of Homeland Security issued a press release claiming that California plans to release more than 33,000 undocumented criminals from the state’s jails if detainers – ICE’s civil requests that local agencies are not legally required to honor – aren’t honored.

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There are a few things to unpack here. First, the administration is referring to “jails.” California state law sharply restricts any cooperation between county jails and federal immigration enforcement. Accessing jails has long been a goal for Trump officials seeking to increase deportation numbers. In Minnesota, for example, Tom Homan, the president’s “border czar”, has routinely pushed sheriffs to transfer people from jails to federal custody during the ongoing immigration crackdown. Homan said this week that more counties are pledging to work with the agency, since state law there allows sheriffs to decide the level of collaboration.

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In California, the state prison system is run by the California department of corrections and rehabilitation (CDCR), which does cooperate with ICE in limited circumstances.

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Under state law, CDCR may notify ICE and transfer custody when people with certain serious or violent felony convictions complete their sentences. Normally, when someone’s release date is approaching, CDCR contacts ICE to determine whether the agency intends to take custody. If the person is a noncitizen and ICE has not issued a detainer, CDCR still notifies federal immigration authorities ahead of the inmate’s release.

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The most recent data from CDCR shows that in 2025, ICE picked up more than 88% of the people for whom it issued detainers while they were in state prison.

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One key point: neither state prisons nor jails are permitted to hold someone past their scheduled release date – a common ask by federal immigration agents.

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Newsom’s office doubled down on the state prison system’s longstanding compliance today, while accusing the Trump administration of trying to “distract” from the president posting a racist video of Barack and Michelle Obama.

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“California cooperates with ICE when it comes to REMOVING CRIMINALS – like sick rapists and murderers – in our state prisons,” the governor’s office wrote on social media.

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It’s not clear what source the administration is using to claim there are more than 33,000 undocumented criminals in California’s jails, or if they meant the prison system. In 2025, CDCR recorded only 1,641 ICE detainers for the more than 26,000 people released from custody.

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Neither the White House nor DHS immediately responded to the Guardian’s requests for comment.

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Chris Stein, Robert Mackey and Maya Yang

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The outcome of a special Democratic primary to fill a US House of Representatives seat representing northern New Jersey was on a knife-edge on Friday, after a progressive challenger took a surprise lead over a former Democratic congressman who initially appeared to have won the nomination.

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The election held on Thursday in New Jersey’s 11th congressional district was prompted by Democrat Mikie Sherrill’s resignation last year after she was elected governor. Eleven Democrats vied to replace her, and on Thursday evening, Tom Malinowski, who represented a neighboring district in the House from 2019 through 2022, took an early lead.

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The Democratic National Committee chair, Ken Martin, quickly congratulated Malinowski, but as the ballot count continued, Analilia Mejia, a progressive activist and former political director for Bernie Sanders, overtook the former congressman.

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The Associated Press has not yet called the race, but Mejia was leading Malinowski by 488 votes on Friday morning, with more than 61,000 ballots counted.

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Following an intense backlash this morning, the White House has now taken down Trump’s Truth Social repost of a video showing a racist clip depicting the Obamas as apes.

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Multiple outlets cite a senior White House official as saying:

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A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down.

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The post was up for 12 hours.

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As we reported earlier, a few hours ago the White House had initially tried to brush off the outrage, defending Trump’s repost as “an internet meme video”.

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“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” Karoline Leavitt said earlier. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

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Politicians from both parties have this morning condemned the post and urged Trump to remove it. CNN also reports that GOP lawmakers had called Trump to discuss it with him, citing a source familiar with the matter.

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Tim Scott, the only Black Republican senator in Congress, had condemned the racist video that Donald Trump posted on social media, depicting the Obamas as apes.

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“Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” Scott said. “The president should remove it.”

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Top Democrats in Congress have condemned Donald Trump for sharing a racist video of Barack and Michelle Obama that depicts them as apes.

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Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, called the president a “vile, unhinged and malignant bottom feeder”. He noted that the Obamas were “brilliant, compassionate and patriotic Americans” who “represent the best of this country”.

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“Why are GOP leaders like John Thune continuing to stand by this sick individual?” Jeffries wrote on X. “Every single Republican must immediately denounce Donald Trump’s disgusting bigotry.”

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The Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, was similarly incensed by the video. “Racist. Vile. Abhorrent,” he said, while echoing Jeffries’ demand for GOP lawmakers to denounce Trump’s actions. “The President must immediately delete the post and apologize to Barack and Michelle Obama,” Schumer added, noting that sharing the video made the president look like a “small, envious man”.

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The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, announced today that officials arrested one of the “key participants” in the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack that killed four US government officials, including the US ambassador to Libya, J Christopher Stevens.

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Bondi said suspect Zubayar al-Bakoush was taken into custody at 3am ET on Friday. “We will prosecute this alleged terrorist to the fullest extent of the law. He’ll face charges related to murder, terrorism, arson, among others,” Bondi told reporters today.

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Bondi announces that a suspect in the 2012 terrorist attack on the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya, has been arrested, 6 February 2026.”,”caption”:”Pam Bondi announces that a suspect in the 2012 terrorist attack on the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya, has been arrested, on Friday.”,”credit”:”Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA”}},{“_type”:”model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement”,”html”:”

The FBI director, Kash Patel, added that he needed to protect the “integrity” of the investigation, and could not expand on operational details, but noted his department carried out what is known as a “foreign transfer of custody” to bring the suspect to the US.

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A reminder that the attack on the American government compounds was a political flashpoint of the Obama administration, triggering years of scrutiny and investigations into the government’s preparedness and response to the attack on the consulate, particularly focused on Barack Obama and then secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

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A Republican-led House committee report, released in 2016, found that while there were government security failures, and blamed then defense secretary Leon Panetta for a delay in deploying forces to respond to the attack, Clinton was ultimately not to blame. At the time, Democrats and critics of the investigation into the attack accused GOP lawmakers of pursuing a politically motivated probe as Clinton pursued the Democratic presidential nomination.

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My colleague Richard Luscombe notes that the White House has tried to brush off the outrage caused by Donald Trump reposting a racist video that depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

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In a statement sent to the Guardian, Karoline Leavitt linked to a post on X last October by a separate rightwing account, which features a 55-second video from which the Obama clip appears to have been taken. It begins with the Obamas depicted as apes, later shows Biden’s head superimposed on a monkey body and other prominent Democrats depicted as other animals, while Trump is shown as a male lion.

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“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King. Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public,” Leavitt said.

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When Rosaly Estévez “self-deported” from Miami to Havana last November, US immigration officers bid farewell by removing her ankle monitor. The 32-year-old had been told she was about to be detained, so she left with her three-year-old son, Dylan, a US citizen.

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Heidy Sánchez, 43, wasn’t given a choice. She was forcibly removed from Florida last April but, worrying about Cuba’s failing healthcare system, she left her two-year-old daughter, Kaylin, behind with her American husband, Carlos.

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“My little girl was still breastfeeding,” she said. “Waiting to get on the plane, my breasts were swollen, and I kept saying, ‘Kaylin must be hungry.’” Sánchez had struggled for years to conceive and Kaylin is her only child.

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Neither woman has a criminal record, but both have been caught up in the US government’s push to deport Cuban immigrants. Now they each live in small towns south of the Cuban capital of Havana, passing their days talking to lawyers and family in the US.

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“It’s been brutal,” said Estévez. “Imagine Dylan hugging his phone every night when he sees his dad. I wouldn’t wish this on any mother.”

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As the US government heaps pressure on Cuba, cutting off access to its oil shipments, Donald Trump has framed the campaign as an effort to make the island safe for Cuban Americans.

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“A lot of people that live in our country are treated very badly by Cuba,” Trump said recently. “They all voted for me, and we want them to be treated well. We’d like to be able to have them go back to a home in their country, where they haven’t seen their family, their country for many, many decades.”

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The condemnation on Donald Trump and the racist video he posted on Truth Social depicting Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, as apes continues to trickle in Friday morning.

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Ben Rhodes, who served as deputy national security adviser under Obama, called Trump “a stain on our history”.

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“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,” Rhodes said on X.

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George Conway, the ex-husband of Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, reminded his followers that he had been calling Trump out over racism since 2019 and linked to an op ed he wrote for the Washington Post titled: Trump Is a Racist President.

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The post was still up almost eight hours later, alongside another post of a video that accused the Democratic party of being anti-Black. Continuing on his social media spree in which he posted more than 60 times over the course of three hours, the president has once again begun posting to Truth Social about an hour ago.

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Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage.

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Donald Trump went on a massive social media spree overnight that included posting on Truth Social an election conspiracy video that ended with a clip depicting former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes.

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The racist depiction of the Obamas – the first Black president and first lady in American history – appears at the end of a one-minute video perpetuating the false and disproven claims that ballot-counting company Dominion Voting Systems helped steal the 2020 presidential election from Trump. The company in 2023 settled for $787.5m with Fox News in a landmark defamation lawsuit.

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For two seconds, the video shows the smiling faces of the Obamas superimposed on apes bobbing to The Lion Sleeps Tonight.

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As of Friday morning, the video has been liked more than 2,500 times and reposted more than 1,100 times, as prominent Democrats decried the post.

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“Disgusting behavior by the President. Every single Republican must denounce this. Now,” said the press office of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, a longtime Trump critic and potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate.

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“This is overt racism. Full stop. There’s no ‘misinterpretation’ and no excuse. This is who he is, who he’s always been, and why he should never be anywhere near power again,” political strategist Adam Parkhomenko posted on X.

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The video was just one of more than 60 posts the president made on Truth Social over the course of three hours. In addition to repeating lies about the 2020 presidential election, Trump posted the Trump Accounts Super Bowl ad and calls to add his face to Mount Rushmore.

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More to come.

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