Does a viral image show a real post by President Trump in which he speaks about Jane Goodall, her family and various apes? No, that's not true: The fake image appeared after there was controversy over a post Trump did make in which Barack and Michelle Obama were shown as apes. However, the "Goodall" post did not appear on Trump's TruthSocial account and the image appears to have originated on a satirical X account.
The image appeared in a post on X (archived here) published by an account named "@ING2Firebrand" on February 7, 2026 with a comment that simply read:
Amazing
This is what the image looked like:
(Image source: https://x.com/ING2Firebrand/status/2019970080365519175)
The text in the supposed post from Trump read:
Many people have commented on a post that was put up by a White House staffer. I even heard from the family of Jane Goodall, and they said "Mr. President, the apes are very upset that you compared them to the Obamas. It was not very nice of you." And I said, "I've never thought of it that way before." We don't want to make the apes sad. There have been many good and famous apes through the years, such as Koko, Harambe, Bear, and the orange one who was friends with Clint Eastwood. Many such examples, enough to fill a whole channel.
We want to Make Apes Great Again. So I told them to delete it.
It referred to a real post Trump did make in which the Obamas were portrayed as apes.
Lead Stories searched for the word "Goodall" on Trump's Truth Social account and no results were returned (archived here).
A Google search for the phrase "Goodall" limited to links containing "truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump" using the "site:" search operator returned no results (archived here), indicating Google didn't recently index such a post either.
All screenshots of the supposed post showed exactly the same counts for "ReTruths" and "Likes" and had the same background. If the post had been real the expectation would be that there were more screenshots circulating showing different counts and/or layouts (night vs. day mode, mobile vs. web interface...).
"Ingenuous Firebrand", the account that posted the image to X (archived here) had a bio that read:
Universally-beloved meme artisan | unofficial official Firebrambassador | Fashion & Lifestyle Coach | humorous-adjacent tweets | certified Alpha
