By Ben R. Williams
By the time this column goes to print, it’s likely that America will have moved on to a brand-new outrage or crime or against humanity. Despite that, I think it’s worth lingering for a moment on the racist video that President Donald Trump posted to Truth Social.
Late on the night of Thursday, Feb. 5, Trump posted a now-deleted video to Truth Social. The brief clip talked about supposed election fraud in Georgia, and then, for a couple of seconds at the end, showed a clip of former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama as cackling apes in a jungle.
People were outraged at this overt bit of racism, and rightly so. Almost immediately, Trump and his inner circle of apparatchiks offered explanations and justifications for the video, all of which were mutually exclusive.
One explanation was that an aide posted the video to Trump’s social media account. Cool; they should be summarily fired. If I posted a video depicting the former President and First Lady as monkeys to the social media of any business I have ever worked at, I would be fired so fast that flames would be licking off of me as I was escorted from the building.
Another explanation: the racist snippet of the video was actually taken from a much longer video depicting a number of politicians as jungle animals with Trump as a lion, the king of the jungle.
I actually watched the original video that the clip was taken from. Every animal choice is intentional. Hillary Clinton is a pig (get it?). J.B. Pritzker is an elephant (haw haw, he’s fat!). Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a donkey (‘cause she’s a jackass!). It was a deliberate choice to depict Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. There is a long, deeply racist history of depicting black people as apes and monkeys. The original context does not improve the situation at all.
And on a side note, I’ve heard a few people defend the video by saying that “it may not be politically correct, but it sure was funny!” I’m going to throw my hat over the fence here and say that if you are over the age of six and find this video knee-slappingly hilarious, you probably lack the intellectual capacity to meaningfully engage with an episode of Hee Haw. This is a level of entertainment about a half-step above someone jingling their keys in your face. If you find that statement offensive, good. That was how I intended it.
Another explanation from Trump himself: he didn’t watch the whole video and posted it without realizing it ended with a deeply racist jab at the former President and First Lady. I don’t believe this excuse for a minute, but let’s assume it’s true. The absolute best-case scenario here is that the President of the United States of America spends about as much time vetting his sources as your least-favorite aunt who has a profile photo of a sunset and a lot of thoughts about immigrants that come out when she’s downed a half-bottle of Boone’s Farm. Yeah, that’s the person I want in charge of international diplomacy.
The only thing that surprised me about Trump’s racist video is that anybody is surprised by it. Some folks seemed shocked to see evidence that Donald Trump might be a racist. I assume those same folks might be shocked to learn that the Pope is Catholic. Racism is Trump’s brand and a big part of his appeal.
Trump comes from a long line of racists; his father, Fred Trump, was so racist that Woody Guthrie wrote a song about how he wouldn’t rent to black tenants. It’s called “Old Man Trump.”
In 1989, Donald Trump ran a full-page ad in all four major New York City newspapers calling for the state to bring back the death penalty, implying that the punishment should be used on five black men charged with raping a white woman in Central Park. All five men were later exonerated after the actual attacker confessed, but Trump maintains to this day that they’re guilty. That seems pretty racist.
In the late 2000s, Trump became a vocal mouthpiece for the birther movement, claiming that Barack Obama was born not in Hawaii but in Kenya. He doubled down on this assertion even after Hawaii released Obama’s long-form birth certificate. That seems pretty racist.
In the lead-up to the 2024 Presidential election, Trump claimed that Haitian migrants were eating dogs and cats off the street. That seems pretty racist.
Have you ever noticed that the only immigrants Trump hates are the ones who aren’t white? Have you ever noticed that when Trump is criticizing an opponent who’s a person of color, he always, always calls them “low IQ?”
The question is no longer “is Trump racist?” The question is, “can Trump ever be racist enough to suffer a consequence for it?”
If someone wanted to damage Trump politically, their best course of action might be to find a way to prove he’s NOT racist. That’s the only thing left that might actually hurt his approval rating.