The American Racist
Why Dehumanization Is the Final Move of Leaders Who Are Losing Power
“This was not a mistake. It was a message, delivered at midnight, denied at dawn, and defended by noon.”
Late at night, while most of the country was sleeping or doomscrolling quietly like responsible citizens, President Donald J. Trump decided to post a video from his social media account that combined two enduring American traditions: recycled lies about the 2020 election and racist imagery so crude it would embarrass a nineteenth-century minstrel show.
The video featured Barack Obama and Michelle Obama with their heads pasted onto the bodies of apes. Not metaphorical apes. Not symbolic apes. Literal apes. The kind historically used to justify enslavement, lynching, segregation, and the comforting lie that cruelty was simply biology in action.
Predictably, the White House response arrived on schedule and on brand. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed the backlash as “fake outrage,” because nothing says moral seriousness like accusing millions of Americans of hallucinating racism they have recognized for centuries.
MORE: CNN Analysis by Aaron Blake
But something unexpected happened. A few Republican senators, including Tim Scott, Pete Ricketts, and Roger Wicker, broke protocol and called the post racist. At which point the White House sprang into action with the reflexes of a practiced crime scene cleanup crew.
The video was deleted. A statement appeared. A “staffer” was blamed. Not just any staffer, mind you, but a magical one with the ability to access the president’s account at midnight, post racially charged propaganda, and then vanish into the walls like a disgraced Hogwarts graduate.
Republicans rushed to condemn the racism once it had been safely reclassified as accidental. Racism is only intolerable, it seems, when no one powerful has to own it.
Then came the plot twist. Later that night aboard Air Force One, Trump admitted that he had posted the video himself. When asked if he would apologize, he replied, “No, I didn’t make a mistake.”
At this point, the staffer likely began updating their resume.
This was not a slip of the finger. It was not a misunderstanding. It was a political maneuver as old as the republic, updated for the age of digital paste and denial. When power erodes, reach for race. When coalitions grow, divide them. When accountability looms, throw a slur and call it strategy.
Trump’s racism is not a personality quirk. It is a governing philosophy. It is what remains when policy collapses, credibility evaporates, and even loyal supporters start asking inconvenient questions about competence. Racism becomes the flare shot into the sky to remind the base who they are supposed to fear and hate.
We have seen this pattern before. When Black journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were arrested while covering protests, white protesters nearby were left untouched. When demonstrators gathered at a church, enforcement followed pigmentation rather than behavior. The message was consistent and unmistakable. Democracy is allowed, but only if it stays the right color.
The manipulation extended beyond arrests. The White House went so far as to digitally alter a photograph of civil rights activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, darkening her skin and making her appear distraught during an arrest in which she was, by all accounts, composed. Reality was inconvenient. So it was edited.
“They couldn’t break me,” Armstrong later said. “So they altered an image showing me broken.” She asked, with devastating clarity, whether she was truly that much of a threat to the world’s greatest superpower.
The answer is yes. Not because she is dangerous, but because she is not alone.
What Trump and his allies fear is not any one person. They fear a coalition. A multiracial, multigenerational alliance of Americans who understand that democracy is not a brand or a birthright but a practice that must be defended. History teaches us that when such coalitions emerge, those in power reach for racial wedges to fracture them. This blueprint stretches back to Bacon’s Rebellion, when elites learned that poor whites and enslaved Blacks united were far more dangerous than divided.
Trump’s ape imagery is not random. It is a dog whistle that has long since become a foghorn. It is meant to provoke disgust in some and delight in others, to force Americans back into tribal reflexes at the precise moment when those reflexes are beginning to fail.
The irony is that this strategy exposes weakness, not strength. Confident leaders do not rely on dehumanization. Secure administrations do not need midnight racism. Empires do not panic, edit photographs of peaceful protesters.
Trump is doubling down on racism because fewer people are buying the rest of the story. The economy is not a miracle. The courts are not loyal. The press is not cowed. The coalition against authoritarianism is growing, not shrinking.
So we get apes. We get denial. We get a staffer scapegoat followed by a personal confession. We get the spectacle of a president insisting that racism is not a mistake but a choice.
And in a way, he is finally telling the truth.
The question is whether Americans will keep pretending this is normal political theater, or whether they will recognize it for what it is: a last, desperate attempt to govern by fracture in a country increasingly determined to remain whole.
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"In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist," -Angela Davis
“Trump is doubling down on racism because fewer people are buying the rest of the story”
Exactly. This will be a further stress point for some wishing to straddle the fence with Trump by making excuses for him — it is now too obvious who & what he is — that is, the ‘Ugly American’.
And as more Americans begin to suffer financial ill effects of Trump’s maneuvers, they will be less inclined to cut him slack on all the other fronts where they only witness, not directly feel, the erosion of American greatness.
He is peeling away his own supporters, disabusing them of any remnants of hope they may have in his redeeming qualities. “Well at least he’s good on the economy.” became “Well at least he’s good for MY portion of the economy.” … is giving way to “He’s only good for his own bottom line.”
When both pro-Trump stock traders and farmers begin losing faith, things are getting bad!
— Let’s hope he doesn’t start (another) war in order to regroup his fan base.