(Dobbs) Did Trump ever post prejudicial pictures of the Bidens' faces over the bodies of apes?Last night’s post wasn’t the first of Trump’s transparently racist insults, and as sure as the sun rises in the east, it won’t be the last.
It doesn’t take a political activist to see how disgusting, how disgraceful, how embarrassing it is that a blatantly racist video got posted last night on Truth Social, the personal website of the President of the United States. It’s racist, because it superimposes the faces of Michelle and Barack Obama on the bodies of African apes. In the background you can hear “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” Hardly a day goes by that Trump doesn’t make mean cracks about Joe Biden, but did he ever post prejudicial pictures of the Biden’s faces over the bodies of apes? Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader in the House, didn’t pull any punches when the post went up: “Donald Trump is a vile, unhinged and malignant bottom feeder.” But Jeffries is a black man, a Democrat, so you’d expect nothing less. However, if you don’t want to take his word for it, or mine, listen to Senator Tim Scott, a black man, a Republican, the only black Republican senator in Congress, who’s also the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and long a reliable ally of the president. He called it “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” Scott’s outrage begs the question, If you’ve seen others before this one, how come it took you so long to call the president out? But this isn’t about Tim Scott, it’s about Donald Trump. Eventually, after almost 12 hours online, the post was deleted and an aide explained, “A White House staffer erroneously made the post.” But even if that’s true, think about it: it took them 12 hours to remove the racist post. Until then— until the fury started pummeling the White House— Trump’s team defended it. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who has never seen a Trump post or a Trump policy she didn’t like, was asked by a reporter why the president put such an offensive piece online. Her answer was, “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King.” Which makes it okay??? And then, as if the whole hullabaloo is the media’s fault, she scolded the journalists: “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.” I’m guessing, Karoline, that among the decent citizens of our nation, this actually matters to the American public, that the president doesn’t even try to hide his barefaced bigotry. And it doesn’t just matter to Republican Senator Tim Scott in Washington. Republican Senator Pete Ricketts of Nebraska wrote, “A reasonable person sees the racist context.” Mississippi’s Republican Senator Roger Wicker said on X, “This is totally unacceptable. The president should take it down and apologize.” Good luck with that. When’s the last time you heard an apology even whispered from the White House of Donald Trump? I watched a panel discussion on CNN where someone postulated that maybe it really was a staffer who put up the post, but a panelist with experience in the White House pointed out that only a handful of trusted aides have access to the president’s Truth Social account, and another pointed out that this one appeared right in the middle of a flurry of other midnight posts that Trump was slapping up on his website. What’s more, even if it was a staffer who posted it and not Trump, I don’t care. The very fact that someone close to him thought this was an acceptable thing to do speaks volumes. And the very fact that it stayed up for 12 hours until pressure mounted on the White House to make it disappear it speaks volumes more. This month is National Black History Month. It seems in keeping with Trump’s mushrooming crusade against minorities that this happened right in the middle of it. When he issued a proclamation about the special month earlier this week, he couldn’t help but diminish its meaning. “For decades,” his proclamation said, “the progressive movement and far-left politicians have sought to needlessly divide our citizens on the basis of race,” alleging “a toxic and distorted and disfigured vision of our history, heritage, and heroes.” Isn’t that rich? Donald Trump, whose website showed a racist manipulated image of our first black president and first lady, is complaining about dividing our citizens on the basis of race? Donald Trump, whose every proclamation is distorted and toxic, is complaining about a disfigured vision of our heritage and history put out by the left? Remember when he said while campaigning in 2024 against Kamala Harris that “all of a sudden she made a turn” and “happened to turn black?” Last night’s post wasn’t the first of Donald Trump’s transparently racist insults, and as sure as the sun rises in the east, it won’t be the last. |