President Donald Trump on Friday refused to apologize for a racist social media post featuring Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys, though he said he condemned it as the White House shifted the blame to staff.

The video shared on Trump's Truth Social account late Thursday night sparked censure across the US political spectrum, with the White House initially rejecting "fake outrage" only to then blame the post on an error by a staff member.

"I didn't make a mistake," Trump said on Air Force One late Friday when asked if he would apologize for the post.

Asked if he condemns the racist imagery in the video, Trump replied: "Of course I do."

Democrats slammed Trump as "vile" over the clip of the Obamas, the first Black president and first lady in U.S. history, while a senior Republican senator said the video was blatantly racist.

Near the end of the one-minute-long video promoting conspiracies about Republican Trump's 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, the Obamas were shown with their faces on the bodies of monkeys for about one second.

The video, uploaded late Thursday amid a flurry of other posts, repeated false allegations that ballot-counting company Dominion Voting Systems helped steal the election from Trump.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt initially played down the row, saying the images were "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 in a statement to AFP.

About-face

But almost exactly 12 hours after the post appeared on Trump's account there was an unusual concession from an administration that normally refuses to admit the slightest mistake.

"A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down," a White House official told AFP.

Speaking to reporters on board Air Force One on Friday, Trump stood by the thrust of the video's claims about election fraud, but said he had not seen the offensive clip.

"I just looked at the first part... and I didn't see the whole thing," Trump said, adding that he "gave it" to staffers to post and they also didn't watch the full video.

There was no immediate comment from the Obamas.

Former vice president Kamala Harris, who has long condemned Trump's divisive racial rhetoric, called out the White House's backpedaling in a post on X on Friday.

"No one believes this cover up from the White House, especially since they originally defended this post," she wrote.

"We are all clear-eyed about who Donald Trump is and what he believes."

'Disgusting bigotry'

While Democrats pounced on the post, it was the outrage from some members of Trump's own Republican Party that appeared to trigger the about-face.

Tim Scott, the only Black Republican senator and once a contender for the 2024 presidential nomination, called the video "the most racist thing I've seen out of this White House."

Scott said he was "praying it was fake" and called for Trump to remove it.

Roger Wicker, another Republican senator, said the post was "totally unacceptable. The president should take it down and apologize."

The top Democrat in the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, called Trump "vile, unhinged and malignant" and urged Republicans on X to "immediately denounce Donald Trump's disgusting bigotry."

Trump launched his own political career by pushing the racist and false "birther" conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was lying about being born in the United States.

Trump has long had a bitter rivalry with his Democratic predecessor, taking particular umbrage at his popularity and the fact that he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

In his second term in the White House, Trump has used hyper-realistic but fabricated AI visuals on Truth Social and other platforms, often glorifying himself and rallying his conservative base around social issues.

During negotiations to avoid a U.S. government shutdown Trump posted a video of Jeffries, who is Black, wearing a fake mustache and a sombrero. Jeffries called the image racist.

One AI-generated video showed fighter jets dumping human waste on protesters, which was created by the same X user who made the video showing the Obamas as monkeys.

Since returning to the White House, Trump has led a crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.

U.S. federal anti-discrimination programs were born of the 1960s civil rights movement, mainly led by Black Americans, for equality and justice after hundreds of years of slavery.

Slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, but other forms of institutional racism continued for decades.