Depicting Black people as apes is one of the oldest and most dehumanizing racist tropes there is. There is no way that President Donald Trump and the White House did not know this when Trump reposted a video depicting former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, as primates on his social media platform Thursday night. The president’s post is more of the same vile racism we have come to expect from Trump and the far right. But when Trump was called out on it Friday morning, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s immediate response was to argue that it wasn’t a big deal and claim, outrageously, that Trump was making a reference to “The Lion King.”
Sen. Tim Scott, R-South Carolina, posted on X Friday it was “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”
But Sen. Tim Scott, R-South Carolina, a Black man who has campaigned for and defended Trump from attacks, posted Friday on X that it was “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” The “most racist thing” seems to be Scott’s admission of the obvious: that there have been other racist things to come out of this White House, too.
Around noon Friday, after it had been up for about 12 hours and after Leavitt had dismissed what she called “fake outrage,” the administration took the post down and insulted our intelligence with its statement to MS NOW: “A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down.”
To be clear, it matters very little that the White House decided to delete the post from the president’s social feed. Because it should have never been posted. Deleting the post was far more about the condemnations that were pouring in from members of both political parties than any sense of remorse from the president. At no point during her attempts to spin, to dismiss and offer half-baked explanation did Leavitt acknowledge the offensiveness of the post or apologize.
In fact, Trump told reporters Friday night that he has no plans to apologize. And if you’ve followed Trump’s career, you haven’t even expected a mea culpa. You know that being defiant and classless is entirely on-brand for Trump.
This is exactly who Trump was before he descended the escalator in 2015 to announce he was running for president. (In that announcement speech, he defamed Mexican immigrants to this country as drug dealers and rapists.) He, his father and Trump Management were sued by Richard Nixon’s DOJ in 1973 for housing discrimination and eventually settled.
In the 1980s, he infamously placed full-page ads in New York City’s major newspapers calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five (now known as the Exonerated Five), the group of Black and Hispanic teens accused of raping a white woman. And as the social media post likening the Obamas to apes reminds us, Trump has a creepy obsession with the former president and his family. Before he told the big lie that he won in 2020, he told the big lie that Obama wasn’t born in the United States. All of this is to say that Trump’s outbursts of racism are not new.
Trump has a creepy obsession with the former president and his family.
It’s because he’s been like this for so long that we need to bear down not just on him in this moment but any members of his administration or elected officials in his party who insist on providing cover for his racism. In his post that correctly called Trump’s social media post “the most racist thing,” Scott said, “The president should remove it.” But Trump removing it cannot be the end of the story. While other Republicans denounced what Trump posted, they must insist that he, at a minimum, publicly apologize, even though he insists he won’t. Otherwise, their denunciations are plain unserious.
We learned Thursday that last month was the worst January for layoffs and hires since 2009. It’s conceivable, then, that Trump meant for his post to distract us from the worst January jobs numbers in 17 years. Or maybe he meant it to shift our attention away from public discourse about the Department of Justice and its latest dump of Epstein files. But even if distracting us was his motivation, Trump’s latest stunt cannot be described as anything but sickening and beyond the pale. There must be zero tolerance for racism from Americans who care about our country and its people. We are less than one full week into the observance of Black History Month, and the president of the United States is reposting videos that liken Black people to apes. This ought to be unfathomable, but such racist, psychological violence from the president’s account stayed up a whole 12 hours before it was removed. Trump is taking a virtual sledgehammer to the idea of America as a place where people of multiple races and ethnicities can co-exist without hate or bigotry. However low our expectations are for Trump, however certain we are that he lacks a moral compass or the ability to be remorseful, we must not allow such vileness to be normalized. Normalizing it would only embolden more Americans to express bigotry and hate. Trump isn’t off the hook because he deleted the post. Americans, of every race and ethnicity and background, ought to be angry. And we ought to make sure that our outrage is as unmistakably clear as his latest expression of bigotry was.
Charles F. Coleman Jr.
Charles F. Coleman Jr. is a civil rights attorney and a former Brooklyn, New York, prosecutor. He is an MSNBC legal analyst. Follow him on Twitter @CFColemanJr. 
