Trump revives racist imagery once seen as disqualifying
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President Trump's post of a racist video of former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama underscores how imagery long recognized as among the most explicit racist tropes in U.S. history has become normalized in the Trump era.
Why it matters: For decades, such imagery routinely ended careers. But even the harshest denunciations from Trump allies suggested they just want an apology, not further accountability.
Catch up quick: Trump recently posted — and deleted 12 hours later — a clip portraying the Obamas as apes at the end of a video on his Truth Social feed.
- The White House on Friday initially said criticism of the video was "fake outrage."
- It later backtracked, deleting the post and claiming it was erroneously posted by a staffer, after the backlash grew to include Republican lawmakers demanding its removal.
- Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who leads the Senate Republican campaign arm, posted Friday that he was "praying it was fake because it's the most racist thing I've seen out of this White House. The President should remove it."
The big picture: Monkey and ape imagery have been used for centuries to dehumanize Black people, especially during slavery and the Jim Crow era.
- Civil rights groups and historians have long classified such depictions as explicitly racist, not ambiguous or coded.
Zoom in: Over the last four decades, such depictions have been treated as an unmistakable racial slur that resulted in widespread outcry and consequences.
- Roseanne Barr tweeted in 2018 that former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett looked like she was from "Planet of the Apes." ABC canceled her show "Roseanne" within hours, calling the tweet "abhorrent."
- Nury Martinez, then-Los Angeles City Council president, resigned in 2022 after leaked audio captured her referring to a colleague's Black child as a "little monkey."
- Marilyn Davenport, a California GOP official, in 2011 forwarded an email depicting President Obama as a chimpanzee, resulting in a formal reprimand and political isolation.
- John Rocker, then a pitcher with the Atlanta Braves, faced MLB disciplinary action in 1999 following a Sports Illustrated profile where he referred to a Black teammate as a "fat monkey," among other racist and homophobic remarks.
- Howard Cosell, an ABC sports broadcaster, called NFL player Alvin Garrett a "little monkey" on live TV in 1983, prompting the network to apologize amid backlash that eventually led to Cosell leaving "Monday Night Football."
Flashback: During the Obama presidency, monkey and ape imagery surfaced repeatedly in fringe political spaces. But when it crossed into the mainstream, it often resulted in resignations, firings or campaign collapses, even among local officials.
- At the time, Republican and Democratic leaders alike frequently denounced the imagery as racist and damaging to public discourse.
Yes, but: Racist images now spread instantly, often repackaged as "memes" or "satire."
- Rhetorical guardrails against racism, xenophobia and dehumanization have all but vanished on the American right, as Axios wrote in December.
- Trump has declared that unauthorized immigrants were "poisoning the blood of our country" (echoing a Nazi theme) and amplified false claims that Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating pets.
The bottom line: Depicting Black Americans as monkeys was once a professional and political dead end.
- Trump's amplification of the imagery shows how far the guardrails have shifted, and how racist symbols once considered disqualifying have been absorbed into the modern political mainstream.
