Leavitt says Truth Social posts are straight from Trump…every week after he blamed staffer for Obama-as-ape video | EUROtoday

Just weeks after the White House — and the president himself — blamed a staffer for a blatantly racist submit that appeared on his Truth Social account, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt assured reporters that something on Trump’s social media website is “straight from the horse’s mouth.”

Leavitt made the startling admission throughout a press briefing on Wednesday in response to a query a couple of message Trump had posted moments earlier on the social media website the place he criticized plans for a U.Ok. land deal. The president’s afternoon missive was the most recent in a sequence of abrupt and largely inexplicable reversals concerning the British authorities’s resolution to cede management of the Chagos Islands and got here simply weeks after Trump had walked again earlier criticism of the deal by describing the settlement as “the best” the Labour chief may strike.

Asked whether or not the president’s newest Truth represented an official shift in American coverage towards the Chagos deal, Leavitt informed reporters that Trump’s submit “should be taken as the policy of the Trump administration” because it had come “straight from the horse’s mouth.”

“When you see it on Truth Social, you know it’s directly from President Trump,” she said.

But Leavitt’s defense of the president’s latest social media activity directly contradicts what White House officials and Trump were saying just days ago after he posted a video to social media that showed Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces superimposed onto apes in a jungle, swaying side to side and smiling as the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” played in the background.

open image in gallery

The video prompted criticism even from some of Trump’s most loyal supporters in Congress, and amid the uproar, a White House official told The Independent that a staff member — not Trump himself — had “erroneously made the post.”

A number of GOP officeholders and prominent supporters of the president publicly called for the unnamed staffer who’d been blamed for the incident to be fired. But thus far, no one at the White House has been ousted over the incident.

Although the White House has an extensive digital communications team that manages the administration’s official social media accounts on X and other platforms, access to Trump’s own Truth Social account is limited to the president himself plus a tight circle of close aides.

Officials did not name the staffer who posted the Obama video to his account.

And, he told reporters on Air Force One after the post ws taken down that he had given the link to someone else to post and had not watched it all the way through. “I gave it to the people, generally they’d look at the whole thing but I guess somebody didn’t,” he told reporters, deflecting to an unnamed staffer.

Trump has long been known to do much of his own posting dating back to his early years on Twitter, when he would opine on just about any subject and wasn’t shy about mixing it up with rank-and-file platform users.

open image in gallery

During his early years as a candidate and his first time period as president, a lot of his on-line exercise was managed by Daniel Scavino, a longtime confidant of the president who has labored for him in a single capability or one other since he was a teenage golf caddy at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey membership.

Scavino, who returned to the White House with Trump final yr with the rank of Assistant to the President and Deputy White House Chief of Staff, is known to nonetheless be a type of few aides trusted with entry to Trump’s private social media megaphone.

But with the 50-year-old taking over a broader vary of obligations in Trump’s second time period — together with working the White House Personnel Office, The Independent understands that the duty of managing the president’s Truth Social output on a day-to-day foundation usually rests on the shoulders of Natalie Harp, an ex-One America News Network persona who serves as a private assistant to Trump and works simply outdoors the Oval Office.

The Independent additional understands that Harp is commonly the individual to whom Trump dictates the textual content of Truth Social posts — when he’s not posting himself. The scope of her involvement within the Obama submit is unknown, nonetheless, and he or she has not been accused of creating it. Harp didn’t reply to a earlier e mail from The Independent.

A former White House and marketing campaign staffer from Trump’s first time period informed The Independent that the president’s late-night posting-and-reposting sprees had been usually his personal doing.