The blowback to Trump's racist video reveals his weakness
Even his allies don't want to be anywhere near him.
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Late Thursday night, President Donald Trump posted a short video which included a horrifically racist image portraying former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as apes.
This was ugly and inexcusable, but not exactly a surprise. Trump has been a vile racist for his entire adult life and has said and promoted vile racism over his last 10 years in and out of the White House. This time, though, was different — not really because of the content, but because of the backlash from within his own party.
The video and its racism were denounced by a wide range of Republicans, including staunch Trump allies. As far as the GOP is concerned, the disgusting video seems to be the worst thing Trump has done since the 2021 insurrection.
Again, the video is shocking and repulsive. But it’s difficult to see why it has sparked more outrage among Republicans than (for example) Trump’s reprehensible effort to smear Alex Pretti, the VA nurse murdered by CBP agents in Minneapolis last month, as an “agitator and, perhaps, insurrectionist.” Nor did Republicans leap up to denounce Trump when he attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar in December with racist slurs, calling her “garbage” and saying she should be “sent back” to Somalia. Nor did they respond to Trump’s slurry of bigotry and gibberish at the National Prayer Breakfast less than 24 hours before he posted the racist Obama video.
Given the GOP’s willingness to back this grotesque racist for a decade, it seems unlikely that they have suddenly somehow come to their senses and/or discovered their heretofore hidden secret spines. What has changed is not Trump’s racism (which is the same as it ever was) but Trump’s poll numbers (which have dropped precipitously).
Republicans are looking for ways to distance themselves from Trump as the midterms approach. That’s a dynamic which Democrats, and all Trump opponents, can exploit — not least because Trump, as he has made clear, is not going to stop being racist.
Racist posts racist video
The video Trump posted was a riff on conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Toward the end, it included a short AI-generated clip which showed images of the Obamas’ faces, their mouths open, superimposed on the bodies of apes. The background music is “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” (You can watch it here.)
Trump claims he watched only the beginning of the clip, then passed it to a staffer to post.
“Generally, they look at the whole thing. But I guess somebody didn’t,” he said.
Trump’s explanation would be a lot more convincing if he expressed any remorse at all for posting it. But he has not. After the first wave of criticism, the White House defended the clip, with Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt huffing, “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
Eventually, Republican backlash forced Trump to take the clip down. When asked if he condemned the video, Trump said “Of course I do.” But he refused to apologize to the Obamas, or to Black people generally, insisting, “I didn’t make a mistake.”
Trump has not said who staffer was, and has refused to fire them. There’s every reason to believe that the “staffer” is a pleasant euphemism for “Trump’s tiny-fingered forebrain.”
It’ss hardly a stretch to believe Trump would approve of racist imagery in general or of bigoted insults directed at Obama in particular. Trump, after all, spent Obama’s presidency pushing a racist conspiracy theory about Obama not being born in the US. He also lied that Obama was the founder of ISIS.
Nor is this the first instance of Trump sharing racist AI imagery — in September he posted a video of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a fake mustache and sombrero. Even the 2020 conspiracy garbage that Trump claims was his true motivation in posting the Obama video is racist. The whole goal of the insurrection was to invalidate the votes of Black and brown people who voted for Biden.
You could fill a book with other examples, starting with Trump’s refusal to accept Black people as tenants in his buildings during the 1970s. As NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote this weekend, “What motivates Trump? The answer is simple: racism.”
The GOP condemns racism for once
Usually, Trump’s Republican allies either ignore his racism or cosign it. That wasn’t the case here though. The outpouring of condemnation was swift, harsh, and sweeping, including both moderates and staunch Trump supporters.
Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi said that the video was “totally unacceptable” and that “the president should take it down and apologize.” Sen. Susan Collins of purple Maine said the video was “appalling.” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania said the post was a “grave failure of judgement.” Rep. Mike Lawler of New York also joined in, though he tried to distance Trump from the debacle by blaming “whoever created the original meme.”
Sens. John Curtis of Utah and Katie Britt of Alabama both condemned the video after it was taken down, indicating that they wanted to be on the record denouncing it. Other Republicans joined in as well, though some — like Sen. John Cassidy — went to pitiful lengths to avoid directly denouncing Trump.
The most discussed response, however, came from South Carolina’s Tim Scott — the only Black Republican senator. Scott tweeted that he was “praying it [the video] was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House” — a formulation which suggests that this is not the first racist thing Scott has seen out of this White House.
Scott’s reaction was cited by a number of other Republicans, and seems to have been key in Trump’s decision to take the video down. Trump has said he contacted Scott to discuss his “mistake.”
The bipartisan outrage led to unusually forthright media coverage as well. The New York Times, which normally prefers using euphemisms when it comes to Trump, called the video “racist” without qualification in a headline. So did CNN. So did the increasingly Trump-aligned, Bari Weiss-ified CBS. The Trumpy Bezos Washington Post was a little less direct, but only a little. Even Chris Broussard of Fox Sports called the video “absolutely horrible” on social media.
Democrats are of course going to criticize ugly racist attacks on Obama — but even their criticism sounded more impassioned and bold than is sometimes the case. Jon Ossoff, a Georgia senator facing a tight reelection bid, said Trump was posting about the Obamas “like a Klansman.” Jeffries was even more unvarnished. He insisted the president personally and intentionally posted the video before declaring, “Fuck Donald Trump and his vile, racist, and malignant behavior. This guy is an unhinged bottom feeder.”
Racist and weak
Tim Scott, The New York Times, and Hakeem Jeffries are all correct — Trump posted an extremely racist video, and also fuck Donald Trump.
The fact that they are all correct doesn’t entirely explain why they were willing to be correct in this way though. If Trump had posted the video in February 2025, Democrats would have denounced it, and perhaps some Republicans would have made some uncomfortable noises. But it seems unlikely that Trump would have faced this kind of sweeping backlash. He might not have even been forced to take it down. As Bouie noted on Bluesky, the press ignores “most of the deranged stuff [T]rump says.”
So why didn’t the press ignore it? Why didn’t Republicans? What’s changed?
These aren’t difficult questions to answer. The monstrous reports of ICE/CBP overreach in Minneapolis, including federal agents murdering two people, have badly damaged Trump’s approval, which was already a lead weight. His approval is now consistently under 40 percent in the FiftyPlusOne tracker. In one recent poll he was 40 points underwater with independents.
Nor are these numbers just theoretical. Last week Democrats flipped a deep red Texas state Senate seat with a 32 point swing from 2024 despite being outspent by millions of dollars.
Republicans know they are facing a massive blue wave and their plans to gerrymander themselves to victory are in tatters. While they continue to try to formulate other ways to cheat and destroy democracy, it looks right now like we will have something approaching free and fair elections, and most Republicans are looking at a national environment in which you’d rather be encased in cement and dumped in a river than tied to Donald Trump in the voting booth.
Trump’s racist video was egregious and horrible. It also came at a time when Republicans — and the media, and even Democrats — are aware that attacking Trump for being egregious and horrible has a lot more upside than downside. This isn’t to say that outrage isn’t real or justified — it’s just to say that everyone is more willing to express that outrage in forceful ways when Trump is weak than when he’s strong.
For Republicans, it also helps that there’s no obvious policy change here. The only real ask GOP critics made was that Trump take the video down and apologize — and they’ll probably mostly ignore the fact that he didn’t do the second. They can now move ahead cheerfully with their plans to disenfranchise and terrorize people of color.
Still, the pushback matters. A news cycle or two reminding Americans that their president is an odious gutter racist isn’t going to help Trump’s approval. Republicans who distance themselves from Trump on one thing may be tempted to do so in the future, and media that calls Trump racist once may be more willing to do so again.
Democrats are also likely to be emboldened in resistance; it’s notable that there has been very little Republican pushback to Jeffries’s “Fuck Donald Trump.” When Republicans are criticizing the president, when the media calls him a racist, when his polls are dropping and then dropping again, it’s a lot easier to see that fighting Trump on everything, all the time, is the best strategy politically and for the country.
There is finally an at least momentary bipartisan consensus that the president does extremely racist things. That’s come a decade too late, and it’s unlikely to be a turning point. But it shows which way the country is trending, and points towards a future where maybe we can finally rid ourselves of this repulsive bigot and his enablers once and for all.
That’s it for today
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It's incomprehensible HOW SLOW the public at large is to notice-discern political dirt-danger-derangement. NOW they're realizing it? The moment Trump boasted about the size of his junk on stage at one of the 2015 GOP presidential debates, a move which accorded with his whole birther smear of Obama, it was obvious to me that this guy was an existential danger to our country, not to mention a disgusting human being and no one I'd want as a leader of the free world.
But NO, the public? We the people? The electorate? The media? As a whole, it has taken TEN YEARS of incessant lying, constant smearing of others, spewing of ideas and views that any conscientious parent would punish their children for espousing, leading an insurrection, getting convicted of felonies, sex abuse, and participating in a pedophile ring with its primary leader - this racist-fascist-despicable excuse for a human being has always been an existential danger to our values, no matter how far apart the culture wars have made them. We the People ELECTED this monster - TWICE! And only NOW, the public, the media is coming to its senses that, "yah, this guy is a racist monster... blah blah blah." Collective blindness takes SO LONG to overcome.
I agree that the Republicans criticism of Trump is a sign of him losing his political power over them. My suspicion is that quite a lot of them have felt that way before but are now fearing his retribution less. And let's be frank: the condeming choir of Republicans was a small one however nicely they sang...As for their efforts to distance themselves from Trump. Well I can see the strategy but it's much, much too late for that!