Donald Trump’s posting of a video depicting former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes was the most overtly racist act of a president since Woodrow Wilson segregated the federal civil service – or since Trump’s previous racist gesture. The racist imagery Trump posted was so egregious that the video’s misogyny representing Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as animals was overlooked. Trump’s denigration of women is implicitly assumed as business-as-usual and not newsworthy: “Quiet, piggy!” And down the memory hole are the 3m long-suppressed documents from the Epstein files in which he is mentioned in its unredacted pages “more than a million times”, according to the Democratic representative Jamie Raskin, who was permitted access.

The only Black Republican US senator, Tim Scott of South Carolina, said of the Obama portrayal: “It’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” though Scott did not disclose any list, which could have been drawn from an encyclopedia of offenses beginning decades before Trump’s birther campaign. During Trump’s first administration, in 2020, Scott chose to call out one incident as “indefensible”: Trump’s tweet of a video of a supporter chanting “white power”. Trump’s latest racist post was preceded on 11 January by his predictable vandalism of Black History Month in an interview with the New York Times with a remark about the Civil Rights Act of 1964: “White people were very badly treated.”

The release of Trump’s Obama video runs parallel to his systematic purge of references to slavery at numerous national parks and sites, following his executive order of 27 March 2025, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”. At Fort Pulaski national monument in Georgia, for example, Trump officials ordered the removal of a reproduction of the infamous 1863 “Scourged Back” photograph of an enslaved man named Gordon with severe whipping scars. At Harpers Ferry national historical park, signs about slavery were flagged for removal. At the Kingsley plantation in Florida, exhibits of the harsh living conditions of enslaved people were ordered for inventory. The historical information at President’s House in Philadelphia noting George Washington’s slaves’ presence there was removed.

But Trump’s video and remark about civil rights has its own inescapable history. However ignorant, indifferent or contemptuous of history he may be, he has evoked the language and imagery of the inaugural address of Governor George C Wallace of Alabama on 14 January 1963, in which Wallace decried “the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the........

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