By Ben Solis, Michigan Advance
While President Donald Trump is facing bipartisan backlash over a now-deleted social media post that included a blatantly racist depiction of former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama, the post itself also contained a widely discredited falsehood about voter fraud in Michigan’s 2020 election.
Trump has recently renewed his commentary on the 2020 election, which he lost to former President Joe Biden, as part of a campaign to convince congressional Republicans to nationalize and take over election administration in states where he falsely believes he won, bolstered by debunked theories of voter fraud.
White House takes down meme of Obamas posted on Trump social media and slammed as racist
Michigan was ground zero for some of the claims that whipped election denialists into a frenzy at the downtown Detroit counting board facility inside the Huntington Place convention center, including a widely discredited theory that votes were switched in Antrim County, which was later found to be a result of human error and not widespread tampering of voting machines.
The situation even led to currently pending criminal charges against two Michigan attorneys, who were charged by prosecutors in an alleged scheme to seize voting equipment and tamper with it in order to prove that there was foreign and domestic meddling in the election.
Each of those claims have been disproven by multiple elections experts while many of the allegations resulted in defamation suits against those who propagated them.
Congressional Republicans have so far turned down the president’s request to meddle in states where Trump thinks he lost in 2020, noting that the U.S. Constitution grants the power of election administration to the states, and not the centralized federal government.
Still, some Republicans in Michigan in the 2026 cycle have been joining Trump in trying to lay the groundwork for the federal government taking over the state’s elections, and have also been using the 2020 conspiracy theory as part of their supposed evidence for why Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who is also running for governor this year, shouldn’t oversee the state’s upcoming contests.
Trump on Thursday took to social media to post a portion of a 2021 “documentary” produced in coordination with My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, an unabashed Trump loyalist, claiming that Michigan voting machines were connected to the internet and that vote switching had occurred to give Biden an edge in the Great Lakes state. Again, those claims have been repeatedly disproven.
How an election denier’s fan club got its start in the states
But any attempt to further the president’s election fraud case was overshadowed by the fact that Trump’s post on his Truth Social media platform was bookended by a different video clip that included a vile racist trope showing the Obamas with their heads transposed on the bodies of apes.
The White House press team at first tried to gloss the image over, saying it was cut oddly and that the video featuring the Obamas was actually the opening footage to a video meme showing Democrats as jungle animals giving fealty to Trump, depicted as a lion.
The only clip featured from that video, however, was a boorishly and crudely racist depiction of the Obamas.
However, the post was later taken down from the Truth platform. The press team is now claiming that a staffer with access to the president’s personal social media account posted it in error, despite that excuse completely contradicting the statement made earlier indicating it was intentional.
Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jon King for questions: info@michiganadvance.com.
