Dem
47
GOP
53
We do not think it is controversial, at this point, to say that Donald Trump is a racist. The very most forgiving reading of his views is that he embraced a moderate-to-liberal understanding of race while growing up in the 1950s, and then he never evolved beyond that. That was a time when it was basically acceptable, even among liberals, to talk about the "good" people of color and the "bad" people of color. It was also acceptable to indulge in "complimentary" racism, like "You know, you Black people sure are good dancers!" Sometimes this is called "country club racism."
The less forgiving reading is that he looks down on, and often hates, people who are not white. His actions as a landlord/slumlord add weight to this line of thinking. So too does his insistence that the Central Park Five were guilty, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Since he became president, the list of "he's more than just a benign racist" evidence includes: "sh**hole countries," much of his border policy, his scapegoating of Chinese people for COVID-19 (aka the "China virus") and his palling around with people like Nick Fuentes.
Yesterday, there was yet another entry in the racism logbook. On Friday night, at the same time that Trump usually gets out his phone and starts going hog wild on his Whites Only social media platform, "someone" reposted a video to Trump's feed, a video from the same guy who made the AI video of Trump dumping sh** on No Kings protesters from an airplane. The video was about a minute long, and 98% of it was the recounting of one of the many conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. However, for about two seconds, very near the end of the video, there was a completely incongruous clip inserted, showing the Obamas as apes:
The message has been deleted from Trump's feed (keep reading), but we saw it while it was still up, and the Obama thing was completely out of nowhere, to the point that while we watched the clicked-upon link, we thought "Did CNN link to the wrong posting?"
We have three theories for what happened here. The first is that Trump is careless about the crap he posts to his feed, and had not bothered to actually watch the video. The second, which we think we probably favor, is that Trump hoped the two seconds of Obamas-as-apes would get lots of attention, and cause people to click on and watch the whole video. The third is that Trump knew full well it was there, and it was an easter egg for his supporters.
Notice that two of these three explanations imply Trump being 100% OK with over-the-top racism. The third merely implies carelessness. But the real clincher is that when the White House was called out on it, it flipped and flopped, claiming, at various times, that: (1) the video was the work of a staffer, and not Trump; and (2) the video was not offensive, and was just a piece of a longer AI video re-casting Democrats as characters in The Lion King. This second claim is sort of true, though it is worth pointing out that there are no apes in The Lion King.
What finally caused a change of course was that some right-wing podcasters and media figures (though definitely not all) called Trump out on the video. They were joined by numerous Republican members of Congress. For example, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), who comes from a state that put the Freedom Riders on death row, a state that did not remove the Confederate battle flag from its state flag until 2021, tweeted that it was "totally unacceptable." Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), the only Black member of the Senate Republican Conference, concurred: "Praying it was fake because it's the most racist thing I've seen out of this White House." That statement, of course, makes clear that Scott has also seen OTHER racist things out of this White House. One wonders how many items are on his list, and how he ranks them.
Eventually, after the posting had been up for 12 hours or so, it was deleted. However, Trump made clear that he has no intention of apologizing and that, in fact, he has no need to apologize because he is "the least racist president you've had in a long time." Upon reading that, readers might well say: "Uh, what about Obama himself, who was just two presidents ago?" The damn thing is that MAGA would respond to that by saying: "So? What about Obama?", having long ago internalized the notion that Obama himself is a racist and is allegedly "the most divisive president in U.S. history." It is that segment that Trump is pandering to with all of his racist dog whistles, both subtle and deafening. (Z)