We should care more about Trump's racist post

It's worth pausing for a moment to recall just a few days ago, President Donald Trump shared a racist clip on his social media account that showed the heads of former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama transplanted onto a monkey. And if there was any question of the clip's intent, walking next to Trump's lion body in the video is Pepe the Frog, a popular internet meme added to a white supremacist symbol database during the 2016 presidential election. It was the latest in a long litany of the president promoting offensive imagery and negative commentary about Black Americans and others. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One last week, Trump claimed he only saw the beginning of the video and tried to pass off responsibility for posting it. "I gave it to the people, generally they'd look at the whole thing but I guess somebody didn't," Trump told reporters, defiant when asked if he should apologize. "No, I didn't make a mistake." The racist post drew bipartisan outrage, a rarity during Trump's second term. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the only Black Republican senator, urged the president to take it down, calling it the "most racist thing" he had seen from the Trump White House. Scott should probably consider paying closer attention to Trump's verbal tirades, since such retrograde rhetoric regularly flows from the commander-in-chief's mouth in abundance. It would be disingenuous to refer this latest, sordid episode as a revelatory moment, because there is no degree of sophistication with Trump. He has referred to Somali immigrants as "garbage," ranted on about supposedly "s--thole nations," and referred to COVID-19 as the "kung flu." He launched his 2016 presidential campaign by disgracefully attacking Mexican immigrants as drug dealers, criminals and rapists. He questioned Obama's birth certificate and perversely ignited his political career by claiming Obama wasn't American. The list of racist and xenophobic remarks is notably lengthy and robust. Referring to Black Americans and people of African descent as monkeys, apes and other primates has long, deeply etched historical roots. From the time of our arrival to this nation, Black people were immediately and routinely characterized as a subhuman species. Correlations between Africans and apes without tails was a common myth and legend propagated by the English in the early 17th century. Equating Black people with animals was commonplace. Throughout the century, many writers did not hesitate to imply that Africans were the descendants of apes or unknown African beasts or vice versa. Closer to home, on American shores, similar regressive ideas were commonplace as well. Founding father Thomas Jefferson, (yes that Thomas Jefferson) wrote without any degree of hesitation in "Notes on the State of Virginia" that Black men were a lower species who lusted after white women and expressed deep misgivings about interracial relationships. Mind you, this is the same Jefferson who would later produce a number of children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings. Such a level of rank and obscene hypocrisy speaks for itself. By the mid-19th century, equating Blacks with animals was par for the course. Even more chilling was the fact the ideology of Darwinism emerged into the public sphere rearing its disturbing, derisive and dangerous message. In 1859, Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species." Although revolutionary, the book did not disregard or discredit prior scientific racial literature. On the contrary, Darwinism would become just one more ingredient for eugenics-minded racists to weaponize in their bigoted arsenal to bolster and justify the retrograde rhetoric of white supremacy. It was due to such vile and negative rhetoric equating Black people (in particular, males) as vile, animalistic, savage beasts that resulted in centuries of dehumanization for people of African descent. Such mistreatment manifested itself in the form of Jim Crow, chattel slavery, lynching, wanton violence, and other abominable forms of marginalization. The reductive 1915 film "Birth of a Nation," produced by D.W. Griffith, assisted in propagating this horrendous, intellectually dishonest mythology. Well into the 20th century, such attitudes continued to flourish during the civil rights movement when Black marchers and demonstrators were frequently referred to as monkeys, apes, baboons and other sorts of primates by virulently violent white racists and segregationists. Oftentimes, such verbal animus was accompanied with physical violence. In fact, a favorite nickname for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., among many such mentally unhinged rabid bigots, was "Martin Luther Coon." In our present day 21st century culture, we have witnessed countless numbers of white people engage in and employ similarly vile rhetoric toward Black people. From law enforcement to academics to K-12 educators to attorneys to entertainers to politicians and so on. The already warm temperatures have only gotten hotter, and there seems to be no cooling down in the forecast. There is nothing "humorous or lighthearted" about Trump's post, despite what some misguided, mentally disturbed people believe. Such rhetoric, especially coming from the president, provides the false message that Black people are not fully human. Such sinister dialogue cannot be allowed to continue in a nation or diaspora that is becoming blacker and browner on a daily basis. Copyright 2026 Elwood Watson, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.