On February 5, a video was posted on President Donald Trump’s Truth Social account depicting former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes in a jungle. The racist depiction of Black people as primates dates back centuries. It is meant to represent them as ugly, savage, and unintelligent—as fundamentally incapable of building a human (white) civilization.

The post was deleted 12 hours later. The White House initially blamed an unnamed staffer for posting it. One White House adviser told reporters, “The president was not aware of that video, and was very let down by the staffer who put it out.” Apparently, they forgot that Trump himself had claimed that only he and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino have access to his social media account.

Later that day, Trump admitted that he knew about the video before its posting. He told reporters, “I looked at the beginning of [the video]. It was fine.” He then added, “Nobody knew that that was at the end. If they would have looked, they would have had the sense to take it down.” Neither the current president of the United States nor his staff is apparently capable of watching a 1-minute video before posting it.

Trump refused to apologize, insisting that he “didn’t make a mistake.”

In some respects, Leavitt is right—that Truth Social post shouldn’t surprise anyone. Trump is the nation’s Racist-in-Chief.

Notably, even conservatives condemned the post (albeit meekly). Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) posted on Twitter-X that this is “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) shared Scott’s post, writing, “Tim is right. This was appalling.” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) similarly wrote: “This post was offensive. I’m glad the White House took it down.”

Democrats, by contrast, used stronger language. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said, “Fuck Donald Trump and his vile, racist, and malignant behavior.” Finally, bipartisanship has been achieved!

Despite this outcry, the White House was quick to dismiss the post as being anything newsworthy. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt demanded that journalists “please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

In some respects, Leavitt is right—that Truth Social post shouldn’t surprise anyone. Trump is the nation’s Racist-in-Chief. It’s a slow day indeed if that video is the only racist thing Trump did all day.

In recent months, he has referred to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a sitting Black congresswoman, as “a disgusting person, a loser,” and “garbage.” Trump says that she, a US citizen, “should be thrown the hell out of our country.” To emphasize, not her country, but “our country.”

More broadly, he says that Somalis are “low IQ people” and that Somalia is “barely a nation.” It “stinks” and is “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.” For Trump, Somalis are savage, ugly, uncivilized, and unintelligent people—fundamentally distinct from the “nice people” from civilized societies like Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Notice the direct parallels between how Trump explicitly describes Somalis on the one hand, and the underlying racist meaning behind comparing Black people to primates on the other. Trump is applying the exact same set of stereotypes in both instances.

For MAGA Republicans, that success is always vulnerable to the threat of “foreign cultures” and Black immigrants, which in this case include both Ilhan Omar and Barack Obama.

Somalia is not the only example. He refers to Haiti as a “shithole” and “hellhole.” That Haitians are “eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.” This narrative—not only wildly racist, but demonstrably false—was amplified by several Republicans, including Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.), Representative Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) and then-Vice President-Elect JD Vance.

Trump’s racism is not an anomaly among MAGA Republicans. Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller remarks, “If Somalians cannot make Somalia successful, why would we think that the track will be any different in the United States? If Libya keeps failing, if the Central African Republic keeps failing, if Somalia keeps failing, right? If these societies all over the world continue to fail, you have to ask yourself, […] what do we think is going to happen?" For Miller, no matter where those people go, the result will be the same: “consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.” Test scores will also consistently drop: “If you subtract immigration out of........

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