Donald’s Racism Has Always Been The Point

The president shared a meme depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. Yes, really.

Image: Donald Trump’s Truth/Social account

by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC – Here’s how worried Donald Trump is about appearing 38,000 times in the new batch of Epstein Files. Overnight, and during the first week of Black History Month no less, the rapidly declining dictator posted on his janky social media app an AI-generated parody of The Lion King in which Barack and Michelle Obama are depicted as apes:

The White House is predictably circling the wagons. Karoline Leavitt:

“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King. Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

Not for nothing but while there’s a mandrill in the movie, there technically aren’t any apes in The Lion King, so the excuse that it was just a random reference to cartoon characters is a pile of horseshit. Even if there were ape characters in the movie, it’d still be blindingly racist.

I don’t know whether he did this to deliberately redirect attention away from the horrifying revelations in the new Epstein documents. But if he did, it’ll give you an indication as to just how panicked he is. Crossing this racism Rubicon, he might’ve wagered, is better for him than what’s in those documents. Think about that.

To be clear: I don’t like playing this guessing game every time he tramples decency or crushes American values and institutions – this familiar distraction-policing routine. Distraction or not, it’s all horrible. It’s all damage. We have no choice but to take each thing for what it is and stop sidelining our focus with endless debates about whether it’s a distraction or not. Apologies for being meta, but distraction-policing is a distraction. After all, this video and all of his other depravities are breaking off enormous chunks from our national soul, and to dismiss these trespasses is to minimize the urgency of the crisis.

And the truth is, racism has always been the iron core of the MAGA movement.

It was birthed out of resentment and fear of a Black president. It’s almost exclusively about far-right political elites exploiting the death rattle of the white American majority. Donald is the embodiment of a last violent, gurgling, hemorrhagic death spasm as white men are relegated to – gasp! – sharing power with everyone else for a change.

The great irony, as we read the latest tranche of documents about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, is that white oligarchs who were Epstein’s rapist sex trafficking clients have never been this powerful and, in order to retain that power, they require the kneejerk support of white Americans who, by the way, they’ve economically screwed sideways for decades.

So they’ve invested billions in propping up a soft, racist, rotting, impotent old man-baby with a savant-like aptitude for hate as the pied piper in their effort to radicalize middle-America around a common enemy: people of color. This’ll keep them from realizing that it’s the aforementioned oligarchs, not Black people, who’ve had their boots on the necks of working and middle class Americans for as long as we can remember.

It’s not a coincidence that Donald is busily resuscitating the Lost Cause myth by scrubbing museums and the National Parks of any mentions of slavery and racial oppression, while restoring Confederate names to army bases and the like.

One of the central goals of the post-Civil War Lost Cause myth was to reunite white Americans of the North and South by manufacturing resentment against formerly enslaved Black people, creating a common enemy. If there’s one thing white Americans could agree upon after the bloodbath of the Civil War was that they didn’t want to lose their political and economic power to the newly freed Black population. During Reconstruction, Black people gained significant representation in all levels of government. But as soon as President Hayes pulled the plug on Reconstruction, white terrorism, Jim Crow laws, and an unprecedented anti-Black propaganda effort was deployed, allowing racist Southern interests to engage in a brute-force historical revision of the war and its aftermath – downplaying slavery, deifying Confederate leaders, oppressing Blacks, and encouraging white racism in every part of the nation.

This is what Donald has revived.

And those of us still tethered to the truth, especially Black Americans, have been aware of it all along. And there’s no greater indication of our societal rot than the fact that so many Americans refused to see it, perpetually giving an obviously racist petty tyrant the benefit of the doubt – a benefit he didn’t earn.

Will this end his reign? Most definitely not. But hopefully it will convince enough Americans to cut bait in the November midterms, manifesting congressional majorities that will make the rest of his life a living hell. And then the hard work of preserving actual history while making racism bad again can continue.

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