President Donald Trump refused to apologize Friday after posting and then deleting a racist video depicting former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes in a jungle, insisting he hadn’t seen the final frames containing the offensive content and blaming a staffer for the mistake.
The explanation, offered to reporters on Air Force One, was the first acknowledgement that Trump himself had screened at least part of the video that had thrown the White House into damage control mode for most of the day. The White House said earlier, after the video was removed, that a staffer had posted it in error.
The video was posted late Thursday night — and remained online for nearly 12 hours — before the White House took it down amid bipartisan outrage, including from close Trump allies. The president, however, insisted Friday evening the video was taken down “as soon as we found out about it.”
“I looked at the beginning of it. It was fine,” he said, referring to the first part of the video that contained debunked claims about fraud in voting machines.
“It was a very strong post in terms of voter fraud,” he went on. “Nobody knew that that was in the end. If they would have looked, they would have seen it, and probably they would have had the sense to take it down.”
Trump said after he watched the first section of the video, he passed it on to a staffer, who he said should have watched it to the end.
“Somebody slipped and missed a very small part,” he said.
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