As a black Republican senator calls it "the most racist thing I've seen out of this White House", the administration says "stop the fake outrage".
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The clip - set to the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight - was at the end of a 62-second video containing claims about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
Republican Senator Tim Scott - who is black - called for the president to remove the post, describing it as "the most racist thing I've seen out of this White House".
The White House initially defended the clip as an "internet meme video" and told critics to "stop the fake outrage".
The clip - which is reminiscent of racist caricatures comparing black people to monkeys - appears to be taken from an X post shared by conservative meme creator Xerias in October.
That video also depicts several other high-profile Democrats as animals, including New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Trump's predecessor in the White House, Joe Biden, also is depicted as an ape eating a banana.
While the president offered no comment in his post, his sharing of the video - one of dozens posted on his Truth Social account overnight - sparked a fierce backlash.
"Disgusting behaviour by the president," the office of California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote on X. "Every single Republican must denounce this. Now."
In a short post of his own, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said that "Donald Trump is a racist".
Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications in the Obama White House, said: "Let it haunt Trump and his racist followers that future Americans will embrace the Obamas as beloved figures while studying him as a stain on our country."
Derrick Johnson, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, called the video "disgusting and utterly despicable" and accused Trump of attempting to distract the public from the Epstein case an
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