US President Donald Trump celebrated Black History Month with one of his most outrageous racist slurs in a long history of insulting jibes at people he hates. This time, the targets were Barack and Michelle Obama, who were portrayed as apes in a now-notorious 62-second meme he posted late Thursday night.
The vile outburst was mostly greeted with silence by Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, who seem to believe their dear leader has the gift of infallibility. And major Jewish organizations, once outspoken defenders of civil rights for all, were mostly AWOL, apparently believing that there’s no connection between overt racism and antisemitism.
By Friday morning, his credibility-starved press secretary defended it and branded any criticism as “fake outrage,” but quickly the proverbial substance hit the rotary device, and the video was pulled.
The Senate’s only Black Republican, Tim Scott of South Carolina, quickly called it “the most racist thing I’ve seen [coming] out of the White House.”
There’s a lot of competition for that title. Like replacing Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Jr. Day as fee-free days at national parks with his own birthday. Or, just this week, disinviting the nation’s only black governor, Democrat Wes Moore of Maryland, to a traditionally bipartisan White House dinner for the National Governors Association (also disinvited was the nation’s only gay Jewish governor, Jared Polis of Colorado).
Then there was the Super Bowl. Trump started early, trashing the halftime entertainer, Bad Bunny, who called for “ICE out” in his speech a week earlier after winning a Grammy. Trump responded to the Puerto Rico-born entertainer’s message of love with his familiar one of hate. He called the highly praised performance “absolutely terrible, one of the worst” – and since it was mainly in Spanish, the president declared it an “affront” to the United States.
The president didn’t attend the big game because he knew that, as happened at the college football national championship in Miami last month, he would be resoundingly booed, this time in front of tens of millions watching around the world. (Vice President JD Vance got the treatment at the opening of the Winter Olympic Games in Italy.)
TRUMP DEFENDED his attack on the Obamas by saying he hadn’t bothered watching the whole thing before posting; he also tried to blame an unnamed (fictitious?) aide who supposedly posted it unseen.
He should know Rule One about posting to social media, even one that you own: “You post it, it’s yours.”
Not Trump. He is notorious for taking responsibility for nothing and credit for everything, a habit he learned from his mentor, the notorious mob lawyer Roy Cohn. Cohn’s mantra has been faithfully followed by his star pupil: Never apologize, always counterattack, and manipulate the media.
Cohn was chief counsel to the notorious Sen. Joseph McCarthy in his 1950s anti-communist investigations. If the US Army’s lawyer, Joseph N. Welch, were still around, he would tell Trump what he told McCarthy in the historic televised hearings. Criticizing what he called the senator’s “reckless cruelty,” he asked, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
When reporters on Air Force One this weekend asked Trump if he would apologize to the Obamas for this racist slur, he said, “No, I didn’t make a mistake,” adding, “I am, by the way, the least racist president you’ve had in a long time, as far as I’m concerned.”
Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist, warned there’s a “100%” chance this will happen again since Trump “can’t admit a mistake, and therefore he cannot learn from the mistake.”
Being perfect is a heavy burden for most, but not for Trump, who has compared himself to Jesus and claimed to be God’s chosen emissary on Earth.
Republican responses to Trump's actions
THE OBAMAS are a long-running favorite target of Trump. He was the voice of the birther movement that claimed that Barack Obama was neither American-born nor a Christian. To emphasize the latter, Trump relishes emphasizing the former president’s middle name, Hussein.
It seems to me that his real problem is that he couldn’t accept that an educated, articulate, popular Black man could be president of his White Christian country.
It goes back at least to his days as a landlord in New York, if not earlier. And to the Central Park Five, Charlottesville, calling developing countries with non-white majorities “s***holes,” their populations “garbage,” and rants like “they’re eating the pets,” his felony convictions, and in his debut in national politics, branding Mexican immigrants as drug dealers and rapists. For more about these and more, just Google.
Dr. Mary Trump, a psychologist and not his favorite niece, called Uncle Donald “an unrepentant, unreconstructed racist who is endangering lives with his blatant racist rants.”
Democrats had the expected condemnations, like House minority leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, saying, “Donald Trump is a vile, unhinged, and malignant bottom feeder.” But what the Republicans said – and didn’t say – was much more important.
A courageous few, like Scott, Reps. Mike Lawler of New York and Mike Turner of Ohio, and Senators Roger Wicker of Mississippi, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, and Susan Collins of Maine, quickly denounced the president’s actions and demanded a retraction and an apology.
For the most part, Republicans were silent until it was taken down, which, for some, may reflect fear of retribution by the bully-in-chief, but at least they denounced the video. Even belated condemnations were important.
Notably silent for too long were Republican congressional leaders, Senate majority leader John Thune, and Speaker Mike Johnson. Both refused to comment on the incident, CNN reported. Their silence says much about their character.
BAD BUNNY’S “ICE out” Grammy message outraged Trump. It also resonated with Latino voters, who are showing signs of swinging back to the Democrats in this fall’s elections.
In last year’s gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey, the winning Democratic candidates carried two-thirds of Latino voters, CNN polling showed, a dramatic 25% shift from a year earlier when Trump won their favor. Pew Research Center reported 70% of Latinos nationwide disapprove of Trump’s job performance.
“Unfortunately, Latinos are leaving the Republican Party after giving us a monumental chance in 2024,” said Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Florida).
Trump’s brutal immigration enforcement is increasingly being compared to “Gestapo tactics” and “ethnic cleansing.”
Concerns about immigration enforcement, affordability, and “a sense that the Republican outreach lacked authenticity” are driving away Latino voters, Alfredo Ortiz, CEO of the conservative advocacy group Job Creators Network, told The Hill. “Immigration enforcement has gone too far,” he said.
Dial back 72 years to the sparring lawyers at the Army-McCarthy hearings and think how much better it would be to have a protégé of Joseph Welch instead of Roy Cohn in the White House today.
The writer is a Washington-based journalist, consultant, lobbyist, and former legislative director at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.