Whoopi Goldberg has blasted Donald Trump for posting a racist meme depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
Last week (February 5), a video was shared on Trump’s Truth Social account, in which an AI-generated sequence showed the former President and First Lady’s faces superimposed on the bodies of dancing apes, set to ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’.
Goldberg was also included in the video as a hippo, seemingly in reference to her having voiced the hyena Shenzi in Disney’s 1994 film The Lion King, with the entire clip designed to depict Trump as the ‘King of the Jungle’.
Many saw the meme as deploying racist tropes and it received an angry backlash from both Democrats and Republicans, and despite White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt urging people to “stop the fake outrage”, the post was deleted after less than a day.
Yesterday (Monday February 9), Goldberg addressed the controversy on The View, saying: “You know, I don’t know why you feel the need to poop on everything. The Lion King is a great kids film full of all kinds of amazing characters.”
Whoopi Goldberg reacts to Pres. Trump posting a racist video about former Pres. Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama. pic.twitter.com/gS7LxIva3P
— The View (@TheView) February 9, 2026
“There are no apes in The Lion King and I just would like y’all at least once, once in your administration, to check your facts, check your stuff. You know, just check.”
Countering her depiction as a hippo being inferior to Trump as a lion, she added: “Just be aware – hippos will kill you faster than a lion in the wild. Hippos lay on you and you’re gone. They chase you…If you’re going to make fun of folks, just make up your own stuff and admit that you did it.”
Goldberg has been a regular critic of Trump, recently being one of many figures to attack him for his controversial comments about Rob Reiner in the days following his murder.
Jack White, meanwhile, was another to vent his anger at the recent Obama post, writing: “This post would basically get anyone, at any job, fired immediately… except for arguably the most important position in the world.”
“That’s right, Trump is a racist, a rapist, a felon, a grifter (currently ordering the U.S. government to pay him $10 billion simply because no one will stop him), and a full-on dementia sufferer, and yet he has the power to send in Gestapo ICE soldiers to k*ll our citizens, and so much more dangerously, he has the nuclear codes and the ability to end humanity at any moment based on an egotistical whim,” he continued.
Trump, meanwhile, slammed Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday (February 8), describing it as a “slap in the face” for America and “one of the worst, EVER”, even suggesting that “nobody understands a word this guy is saying”.
There has been a litany of entertainment figures speaking out against Trump and ICE in recent weeks, including Bad Bunny himself, Billie Eilish, Green Day, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Morello, Mark Ruffalo and Lady Gaga.