In Front of Our Noses: A President Who Posts Blatantly Racist Images
Trump and the Obamas.
Via the NYT: Trump Posts Video Portraying the Obamas as Apes.
President Trump late Thursday night shared a video that contained a brief clip portraying former President Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama as apes.
The clip, set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” was spliced near the end of a 62-second video that promoted conspiracy theories about anomalies in the 2020 presidential election.
The clip appeared to have been taken from a video that was shared in October by a user on X whose watermark is shown, with the caption “President Trump: King of the Jungle,” and an emoji of a lion.
In that video, several high-profile Democrats — including former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and former vice president Kamala Harris — were shown as zebras, giraffes and other animals, while Mr. Trump was depicted as a lion. The Obamas, in the clip, were shown as apes. The video ended with the animals bowing down to Mr. Trump.
But, you know, no big deal. Just another day in the Trump White House.
In response to questions about the clip, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, called it “fake outrage.”
She added: “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King.”
I sincerely miss the days when a) it was unlikely, to say the least, that the occupant of the White House would post a racist video on social media, and b) if they did so, it would be an embarrassing scandal.
Instead, we get shrugging of shoulders, excuses that it is just “Trump being Trump” (which, of course, it is), and denial and/or downplaying from the administration.
In the pantheon of things I could be writing about, this is far down the list, but I think it is also the kind of thing worthy of noting or, at least, not ignoring. Not only is it blatantly and obviously racist, but it is also an illustration of the childishness of the sitting president, alongside the fact that he has a tremendously important job and yet spends a ridiculous amount of time on social media, mostly to stroke his own ego.
While on the one hand, I can hear the responses now that it is better that he play on Truth Social than actually be trying to govern, on the other hand, not only does it show a problematic mind, but I would note that he is not beyond getting ideas about governing from memes on Truth Social.
Moreover, I would note, if you have ever doomscrolled on Twitter, Blueksy, or wherever, you know how it can affect your mood and outlook. Can you imagine how the massive ego and weird, stunted intellect of Donald J. Trump are affected by a social media platform designed to praise him?
Part of me doesn’t want to share the image, but I think it is important to see it. Here is a screenshot from a CNN clip:
The linked clip is worth watching as well because it shows yet another Republican elected official who lacks the fortitude to say anything that might get him in trouble with Trump.
The way this president relentlessly degrades the office, corrupts his party, and coarsens our society is truly staggering.
UPDATES:
- Here is a great piece about how much time Trump spent on Truth Social in 2025 from WCVB: Here’s the data on how President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social in 2025.
- And via that link, a searchable database of his posts via Roll Call.
Or that a government official would act like a five year old pretending context doesn’t exist.
I’m shocked! Trump always seemed to be such a classy guy.
What do Republican politicians say about this? Let’s ask Mike Johnson for his opinion.
The smartest thing Trump ever did was put that magic “(R)” after his name before getting into politics.
This is deeply appalling and disturbing. And Karoline Leavitt needs to never, ever be employed by anyone after she leaves this job, she is a disgrace.
The defense I anticipate is that Dems have long compared Trump to an orangutan. (There were also a lot of Dubya-chimp memes, but I don’t think they’ll go back that far.) Of course this argument is bogus as there’s no history of doing ape comparisons against whites because they are white, but I don’t expect the MAGA defenders to grasp this distinction.
All that said, while I could be mistaken, as far as I can recall Trump has never done or shared Obama-ape memes before, so this is a new line he’s crossed. You can call it trivial compared to so many other things going on, but it does at least suggest his willingness to reach new extremes.
Over 72 posts in 10 minutes????
Somewhat of a tangent, but recently I watched a Neil DeGrasse Tyson podcast where he discusses the history of scientists classifying black people as an evolutionary middle ground between humans and chimps, and he argues that if black people had dominated Western science back then and wanted to be racist against whites, they could just as easily have pointed to features in which Caucasians seem more chimp-like than blacks do (more body hair, thin lips, bigger ears, relatively light skin, etc.).
The comments under Tyson’s video were filled with people accusing him of promoting anti-white racism, completely missing the point he was making. His point isn’t even remotely new, or an argument exclusively made by blacks. Martin Gardner’s 1957 classic Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science includes the following remark:
Per NBC, Trump has taken down the racist video. I wonder what convinced him to do so?
Is this what anti-wokeness is? This is what those people complaining about wokeness want for our country?
@Kylopod: The argument appears to be that if someone somewhere – some rube with a keyboard – says something rude about Republicans, then the Republican president can counter and escalate. That’s the logic.
@HelloWorld:
Yes, and yes. Note that lefties are offended, and that the man who posted the racist shit will face no consequences. That’s freedom.
They want that freedom for everyone. The freedom to be openly racist.
@CSK: When your dad has dementia, sometimes ya gotta take his phone away. I always wonder who the other person/s are that have access to his truth social account? Has to be someone.
So far the defenses seem to be: the offensive bit is at the end and Trump didn’t see it, some senior staffer posted it in Trump’s name, or Trump delegates posting and some flunky sent it out.
They’re too dumb to know what they’re posting and they have no review process is a defense?
@Gustopher:
What they want is not only to be openly racist, but to never ever be called racist.
@Kathy:
This. Queue it up: ‘I suppose you’re going to call me a racist, now?’
Why, yes, yes I am. Thanks for asking.
@Kathy:
I actually disagree a little–I think they do want to be called racist because it’s what fuels their victim complex. A big part of anti-woke and anti-PC culture involves weaponizing accusations of bigotry or insensitivity against those who make the accusations. If the accusations didn’t exist, they’d have to invent them–and in fact they often do so anyway (think of the many times they have claimed someone was calling them racist when the person was saying no such thing). It’s kind of like the way Bari Weiss wanted to be fired from NYT so she could cry cancel culture, and when they didn’t she quit instead and cried it anyway. Similarly, many of the alt-right memes (the OK gesture, the milk thing) are designed deliberately to provoke accusations of racism, just so they can mock the accusers for reading into the most innocent of memes.
@Jc:
Indeed. Maybe Susie Wiles? Do you think he even knows that it’s been removed?
@Jc:
Most people’s dads aren’t the commander in chief of a mob of inbred zealots who literally stormed the Capitol and who are now literally shooting random people in the street.
@CSK: We need to find who convinced him to do so and have them convince him to reverse a lot of other stupid shit.
@Kylopod:
I give up. I must have missed it.
What is the milk thing?
What the hell is wrong with these people?
@Kylopod:
Not to mention there is no such thing as “Black People” in genetics.
Nilotics and Bantu and Hamites and Khoikhoi are more distinct in heredity than most extra-African populations are from each other.
Skin pigment is relatively trivial
And that includes various non-African “black” groups: Austalasians, Polynesians, Tamils, etc who are generally genetically closer to Europeans and Asians than to any Africans.
I still contend a lot of this is based on the US historical legacy of “colour based” slavery etc.
Hence also the American categorisation of “colour shades”: e.g. the people of ME/NA are definitionally “brown”.
When in reality anyone who can distinguish identically dressed Turks, Greeks, Sicilians, Tunisians, Maltese, Lebanese, Iranians, Circassians, Andalusian Spanish, etc deserves a prize.
For myself, I’d far rather have Obama as a president than Trump.
(Despite my massive arguments with his ME policy)
And my objections to Rishi Sunak and Kemi Badenoch as national leaders are not, I think and hope, based not on any “racial” grounds, but on their policies.
@JohnSF:
I wonder.
I don’t think I’ve read anything about what white Europeans thought of other skin colors prior to the invasion of the Americas. Shortly after this, black slaves began to be imported to do work, in large part because new diseases had wiped out large numbers of the western hemisphere’s natives.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the many aspersions cast on black people began there, or grew more popular then.
Initial reports of the native populations by Columbus and others were relatively positive. When they proved troublesome to press into labor, the reports started calling them weak, dumb, lazy, etc.
@Kathy:
The history of slavery is an interesting, yet extremely unpleasant, subject.
See why “Slavs” became both an original definition (roughly, “the honourable people”) but also via a nasty Latin pun, “the enslaved”.
Chattel slavery gradually died out in western Europe, due to canon law on Christians not being slaves (but serfs, especially in Russia were as near to slaves as makes little diffrence).
But the Roman and Germanic laws still had slaves as a permissible category.
The divide became between Christians and non-Christians, both of whom would merrily enslave each other.
By extension, the Iberians considered enslaving either Muslims or pagans perfectly legal.
So, when the Spanish expansion provided both an African source, and American market, for slaves, there was no standing legal prohibition, and the trade exploded.
And the British soon cut in on it.
So, you have a slave source that is, rather by coincidence mainly “black”, and in the Americas a market for slaves.
And in North America a Protestant population that has both religous and historical reasons for rejecting slavery, but an urgent economic impertive for accepting it.
And the slaves concerned are “black”.
So, very rapidly you get the justifiction, now disconnected from the religion of the enslaved: “black” = “slave”.
And after the Civil War can the South accept that black slavery was wrong?
No.
Because that would make their parentage culpable.
Therefore, even if not slaves, “blacks” *MUST* be inherently inferior.
Beacause to think otherswise is unthinkable, and opens up too many issues.
Which only increases as time goes by.
And also hence, imho, the entire American thing about racial categorization, even when, in an external context, it makes very little sense whatsoever.
@Kathy:
Most indications from Roman and medieval history is they were not much bothered.
Most slaves in both were white, and in Medieval Eurorpe a declining category (complicated).
Racialised slavery seems to have been an early-Modern onward development, that was initially not about skin colour at all, but about religion.
But from the early-Modern on, the non-Christian and therefore legally “enslaveable” were mostly non-white.
So quite soon, “non-white” got to be “enslaveable”.
From the western European pov:
Muslim slave raids/trades in Europe continued for quite some time.
Notably in the Balkans and Ukraine.
But as late as the 1630s, the Maghrebian corsairs carried out slave raids in Ireland, Portugal etc,
Estimates are that at least a million Europeans were captured by Maghrebian slavers in the 17th century.
One reason for the Conquistadors: they came up in a hard school.
See also the US re the Barbary Corsairs, who were no joke.
And the French conquest of Algeria, contra some current orthodoxy, was not just driven by “horrid rotten Westen capitalist imperialist racism” but being very pissed off with piracy and slavery.
@JohnSF:
@JohnSF:
I’ve read a lot of serious, or at least socially respected, European scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries write all sorts of race based aspersions about Blacks, Asians, Arabs, natives of the Americas, and even some other Europeans.
So, yes, a lot of racism in the US is based on Southern notions of slavery. But there was precedent. then, too, the French in Saint Domingue (modern Haiti) were far from exemplary in this regard, though they were more accepting of free black people.
@Kathy:
Yes, the “race coded” slavery was not just an American thing.
It became common with the European sugar/slaves system in the Carribbean,
It was both enormously profitable, and horrifically inhumane.
And to justify it, “black inferiority” became an obvious exculpation.
But before that, colour was not so much a factor.
Religion was.
The European imperial expansions of the 17th cnetirty onward tended to racialised categorization.
And European Christians were always confident about their superiority.
But that was not really “racial” in the modern sense.
See Franks vs pagan Saxons, Germans re Poles and Balts, “Latins” vs Greeks.
The emergence of concepts of “white superiority” (as opposed to Christian vs “heathen”) was a gradual process.
And in part, imho, related to the long standing disdain of the emergent European aristocracy to all “lesser breeds”.
Which said “lessers” were all to willing to apply to anyone they could conceive as “lesser” to them.
However, when it came to “racial” distinction, that only really kicked in with the African slave trade.
When the older religion based differentiation of “who can be enslaved” gets mapped onto colour.
If you look at European dealings with Turks, Indians, Chinese etc they certainly assumed superiority, but largely in a cultural sense.
For related reasons, black Africans became more and more regarded as inherently, essentially inferior, stupidly enough.
But also the Europeans (and especilly some Brits) came to reject slavery.
But then the US South dialled race slavery up to 11.
And then the post-Civil War South could not bear to admit they had been mistaken.
Therefore, “blacks” must be kept down, and a whole “Christian” racial hierarchy must be valid.
@Gregory Lawrence Brown: Apologies for the late reply.
Basically, some alt-righters began promoting milk, ostensibly as a stance against soy and veganism, but also because it is, y’know, white. After being called out on it by watchdog groups, they said it was satire proving the left thinks milk is racist.