Why Rep. Al Green held ‘apes’ sign protesting Trump at 2026 State of the Union

On Feb. 24 2026, as U.S. President Donald Trump entered the House of Representatives chamber to deliver his State of the Union speech, Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, unfurled a sign reading “Black people aren’t apes.”

The White House’s livestream (archived) of the event caught the moment as other representatives greeted and applauded the president.

After unfurling his sign, Green was ejected from the House chamber. (Green also was ejected (archived) from the chamber the year before, when he heckled Trump during the president’s address to a joint session of Congress.) Green later told Reuters (archived) the sign was a reference to a video the president’s Truth Social account posted and deleted earlier in the month.

The video in question started by showing a graph that claimed to track vote counts for Trump and former President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election but switched to a two-second clip that showed the Obamas’ faces on two apes‘ bodies as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” played in the background.

Comparing Black people to primates is an age-old racist insult that implies Black people are less-developed humans. The baseless argument that Black people are less developed or less evolved than white Europeans has historically been used to justify enslavement of Black people and colonialism of countries with majority-Black populations.

Claims that Trump posted the video showing the Obamas as primates first circulated on Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived), Threads (archived) and Bluesky (archived) in early February. A number of Snopes readers emailed us at the time to ask whether the video was truly shared on Trump’s account. Readers emailed again after the State of the Union address, asking about the context for Green’s sign.

At the time of this writing, someone had removed the video depicting the Obamas as apes from Trump’s Truth Social page. It still appeared on Trump’s Truth, a public archive of the president’s posts. A White House official told Snopes a staffer posted the video “erroneously.” Snopes could not yet independently verify this claim.

Ultimately, Trump’s Truth Social page truly did post the video.

Before the removal of the post from Truth Social, we asked the White House whether the person who posted the video knew it also included the clip of the Obamas. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt replied in a written statement: 

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.

At that time, Leavitt did not reply to a question about whether anyone would remove the video. 

Inspecting the video

According to a post (archived) by the X user @xerias_x, the clip of the Obamas came from one of that account’s videos. The user wrote, “Last night President Trump posted a video where one of my old clips appears at the very end. You won’t believe which one.”

The user then posted (archived) a 53-second version of the same clip that started by showing the Obamas as apes and also included various other Democratic politicians portrayed as a variety of other animals bowing to Trump, whom the video depicted as a lion.

It was not possible to determine why the video on Trump’s Truth Social profile, which otherwise appeared to show an excerpt from a documentary about alleged fraud in the 2020 presidential election, contained the clip of the Obamas.

Online searches revealed an identical (archived) video to the one Trump posted that someone uploaded to YouTube around a month before Trump’s Feb. 5, 2026, post. The YouTube video also included the short clip of the Obamas.

2020 election fraud claims

Reverse image searches did not reveal the source of the apparent documentary footage. That footage featured Col. Phil Waldron, an Army veteran who reportedly circulated a “detailed and extreme” plan to overturn the 2020 election on Capitol Hill. 

Waldron has featured in a number of documentaries since 2020. He is a proponent of a baseless theory that foreign powers hacked or otherwise influenced voting machines from the company Dominion Voting Systems and swung the 2020 election in Biden’s favor. In the apparent documentary clip featured in Trump’s Truth Social post, Waldron claimed machines in several states “stopped counting” at the same time and, when counting resumed, showed vote totals “that favored Joe Biden.”

Trump’s reposting of Waldron’s theory suggested that the president has not forgotten his 2020 loss. In January 2026, the FBI raided an elections office in Georgia seeking records related to the 2020 election. Trump narrowly lost the state in 2020.

During a speech (archived) in Davos, Switzerland, days before the raid in Georgia, Trump called the 2020 election “rigged” and said “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did.”

Snopes has previously reported extensively on claims related to the 2020 election.

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