In racist video depicting Obamas as apes, Trump makes it clear what comes next

Welcome to Black History Month, 2026 style.

President Trump posted a video on Thursday to the social media site featuring animated images depicting former President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama as monkeys.

The White House removed the post on Friday, calling it an employee’s mistake after initially stating it was nothing more than a meme. Certainly.

However, while there is justified anger against this blatant racism While it turns itself into a brief media circus (it lasts about three minutes because we all know something else is going to come up), let’s dig a little deeper into why this video is more than just an affront to everything America represents or should represent anyway.

It’s no coincidence that the Obamas’ pictures are embedded deep in a video. voter fraud conspiracies From the 2020 elections (again, these are not true). This video shows the potential escalation of the attack on voting rights and voting access in the midterms.

“There is definitely a connection to voting,” Melina Abdullah told me Friday. He is a professor at Cal State Los Angeles and co-founder of Black Lives Matter-LA.

“This is about much more than the Obamas,” added Brian Levin, professor emeritus at California State University at San Bernardino and founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. “This is about people (who are perceived to be) undermining our elections and our democracy.”

I caught up with Levin the day after he wrote a chapter on this topic. authoritarianism For a new book that examines how discrimination and the imposition of social hierarchies are linked to power.

Let me summarize. Vulnerable groups are oppressed as dangerous and unfit to be full citizens; Therefore, a smaller elite group can legitimize power by using any means to protect society from these vile and evil influences.

Let me simplify this message even further: Black and brown people are evil and should not be allowed to participate in democracy because They don’t deserve rights.

How will this play out at the ballot box?

We’re talking about all this Voter ID and election integrity It’s actually about preventing people from voting, that is, people who have the legal right to vote. They are often the least likely to obtain a passport or birth certificate, as well as proof of citizenship, which may require money and know-how to obtain such documents Black or brown people. They are often poor or poorer and therefore have less time and money to spend on getting documents, and they also live in urban areas where they share polling places.

Is it so hard to imagine legal voters, who have long been a powerful bloc of the Democratic base, being held under some sort of federal surveillance, turned away — or simply intimidated — at such polling places?

Let’s hope this never happens. But both Levin and Abdullah said the current undermining of the legitimacy of Black and brown voters is systematic and concerning.

Levin said Trump’s latest video “is part of a barrage of bigotry and conspiracy regarding elections, immigrants, and Black people, and it’s important to condemn the way these puzzle pieces have been put together to label African Americans and immigrants as threats to democracy regarding voting.”

The premise of the video in question is that Democrats are engaged in a complex, decades-long scheme to steal the election. It’s presented as a documentary, and footage of the Obamas is oddly placed near the end, almost like a subliminal flash.

If you missed the white supremacist posts that have now become commonplace in official government communications like the Departments of Labor and Homeland Security, I can assure you that Levin is right, and this first video is actually part of a “firehose” of white nationalist rhetoric coming not just from Trump but from the federal government as a whole.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, for example, has shifted its focus to criminalizing diversity, equity, and inclusion. Just this week, another federal agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, opened an investigation against Nike for allegedly discriminating against whites in hiring.

“It wasn’t even a dog whistle, it was a photocopy of the same terms I had been looking at on white supremacist and neo-Nazi websites for decades,” Levin said.

It is not my job or my intention to warn black people about racism because that would be ridiculous and insulting, but I will warn the rest of us because in the end authoritarianism targets everyone. This video is a clear statement of Trump’s vision of America that every non-white group, indeed every vulnerable group, is a second-class citizen.

“It enables a whole group of people who want to take this country back to a time when violent white supremacy was enabled by law,” Abdullah said. “What they mean is a recapture of the old-school, oppressive racism that existed before the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”

That message “resonates with a significant portion of his base,” Levin said, and when fed into the system repeatedly, it can lead to violent consequences.

Levin gives an example of Trump’s tweet during the protests over the killing of George Floyd: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” It’s a phrase with a violent and racist history.

Levin said black people have always been the primary target of hate crimes in the United States, but after this tweet it was one of the “worst days” of race-based violence.

“When a high transmitter, such as a president, spreads images related to prejudice, it creates stereotypes and conspiracy theories, which then become the basis for further conspiracy theories and aggression,” he added.

Abdullah said he is concerned that even if voter suppression is not officially sanctioned, empowered conspiracy theorists will still take action.

“So the people who are doing the so-called ‘monitoring’, the self-appointed monitors… those are the ones who are going to pull people from the voter lines, and that’s what he’s deliberately instigating,” he said.

Keep an eye on the ball, folks, because the far-right Republicans running the show are laser-focused on it. In order for them to stay in power, the midterm elections need to go well.

The easiest way to ensure this outcome is to only allow voters to see things their way.