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- The video is a clear statement about Trump’s vision of America: that members of non-white groups are second-class citizens.
- All that talk about voter identification and election integrity is really about stopping people from voting.
Welcome to Black History Month, 2026 style.
President Trump posted a video Thursday to his social media site that contains animated images depicting former President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama as apes.
The White House took down the post Friday, and after first calling it nothing more than a meme, they dubbed it a mistake by a staffer. Sure.
But while the justifiable outrage over this overt racism spins itself into a brief media circus (because we all know something else will come along in about three minutes), let’s look a bit deeper into why this video is more than an affront to everything America stands for, or should stand for, anyway.
It’s no accident that the images of the Obamas are embedded deep inside a video about voter fraud conspiracies from the 2020 election (which are untrue, if I need to say it again). This video is an escalation in the assault that is likely to come on voting rights and voting access in the midterms.
“Absolutely, there’s a connection to the vote,” Melina Abdullah told me Friday. She’s a professor at Cal State L.A. and co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles.
The post quickly drew fierce criticism from Democrats, some Republicans and civil rights organizations.
“This is about more than just about the Obamas,” added Brian Levin, a professor emeritus at Cal State San Bernardino and founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. “It’s about people that are [perceived as] undermining our elections and our democracy.”
I caught Levin the day after he turned in a chapter about authoritarianism for a new book, which happens to look at how discrimination and the imposition of social hierarchies ties in with power.
Let me summarize. Vulnerable groups are smashed down as dangerous and not fit to be full citizens, so a smaller group of elites can justify power by any means to protect society from these lowly and nasty influences.
Let me make that messaging even simpler: Black and brown people are bad and shouldn’t be allowed to participate in democracy because they don’t deserve the right.
How does that play out at the ballot box?
All that talk about voter identification and election integrity is really about stopping people from voting — people who legally have the right to vote. Those who are least likely to be able to obtain proof of citizenship — which might require a passport or birth certificate, along with the money and know-how to get such documents — are often Black or brown people. They are often also poor, or poorer, and therefore have less time and money to put into obtaining documents, and also live in urban areas where they share polling places.
Is it such a stretch to imagine some kind of federal oversight at those types of polling places, turning away — or simply intimidating away — legal voters who have long made up a strong bloc of the Democratic base?
Let’s hope that never happens. But the current undermining of the legitimacy of Black and brown voters is, Levin and Abdullah said, systemic and concerning.
Trump’s latest video is “part of a floodgate of bigotry and conspiracy that relates to elections and immigrants and Black people and it’s important to condemn the manner in which these puzzle pieces are put together to label African Americans and immigrants as a threat to democracy with respect to the vote,” Levin said.
The premise of the video in question is that Democrats have engaged in a complicated and decades-long scheme to steal elections. It’s presented as a documentary, and the images of the Obamas have been weirdly inserted as almost a subliminal flash near the end.
If you’ve missed the white supremacist postings that have now become commonplace on official government communications such as those from the Departments of Labor and Homeland Security, let me assure you that Levin is right and this primate video is indeed part of a “firehose” of white nationalist rhetoric coming not just from Trump, but from the federal government as a whole.
The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, for example, has turned its focus toward punishing diversity, equity and inclusion. Just this week, another federal agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, began a probe against Nike for allegedly discriminating against white people in hiring.
“It has been not even a dog-whistling, but a Xeroxing of the exact kind of terms that I’ve been looking at on white supremacists’ and neo-Nazi websites for decades,” Levin said.
It’s not my place or intent to warn Black people about racism, because that would be ludicrous and insulting, but I’ll warn the rest of us because in the end, authoritarianism targets everyone. This video is a clear statement that Trump’s vision of America is one in which every non-white group, every vulnerable group really, is a second-class citizen.
“He’s enabling an entire group of people who want to take this country back to a time when rampant violent white supremacy was enabled in the law,” Abdullah said. “What they mean is recapturing an old-school, oppressive racism that is pre-1965, pre-Voting Rights Act.”
MAGA has built its rage-filled movement pretending to protect children. Now, it’s going after LGBTQ+ marriage, claiming it harms kids.
That message, Levin said, has “a resonance with a decent part of his base,” and when fed ceaselessly into the system, can have violent outcomes.
Levin uses the example of when Trump tweeted during the 2020 protests over the killing of George Floyd: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” a phrase with a violent and racist history.
Levin said Black people have always been the primary targets of hate crimes in the United States, but after that tweet, it was some of the “worst days” for violence aimed by race.
“When a high transmitter, like a president, circulates imagery with regard to prejudice, it creates these stereotypes and conspiracy theories, which then are the groundwork for further conspiracy theories and aggression,” he added.
Abdullah said she worries that even if the voter crackdown isn’t officially sanctioned, those empowered conspiracy theorists will take action anyway.
“So the people who are so-called monitoring, self-appointed monitors ... this is who’s going to be pulling people out of voter lines, and so this is what he’s whipping up intentionally,” she said.
Keep your eye on the ball, folks, because the far-right Republicans running the show are laser-focused on it. The midterm elections have to go their way for them to remain in power.
The easiest way to ensure that outcome is to only allow voters who see things their way.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The video depicting the Obamas as apes is racist and represents a deliberate escalation in assaults on voting rights and electoral access, not merely an offensive meme that should be dismissed as a momentary controversy.
The racist imagery is strategically embedded within a larger narrative promoting false election fraud conspiracy theories, designed to dehumanize Black and brown voters as threats to democracy and to justify restricting their participation in elections.
This video is part of a broader pattern of white supremacist and white nationalist rhetoric emanating from the federal government itself, including recent actions by the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division targeting diversity and inclusion programs and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigating alleged discrimination against white people.
The messaging underlying the video—that Black and brown people are unfit to participate in democracy—connects directly to voter suppression efforts disguised as election integrity measures, such as voter identification requirements that disproportionately burden poor and urban Black and brown communities who lack easy access to required documentation.
When high-profile figures like the president circulate imagery rooted in prejudice and conspiracy theories, it creates a foundation for further aggression and can embolden violent outcomes, particularly given that Black Americans have historically been the primary targets of hate crimes in the United States.
The video demonstrates Trump’s vision for America as one in which every non-white and vulnerable group is relegated to second-class citizenship, representing a desire to roll back civil rights protections established after the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Different views on the topic
The White House characterized the post as originating from a longer internet meme video that depicts Trump as the King of the Jungle and various Democratic figures—including Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Senator Adam Schiff—as different animals from The Lion King, arguing that critics are manufacturing outrage over decontextualized content.[1][2]
A White House press secretary dismissed the backlash as “fake outrage” and called for media focus on issues that “actually matter to the American public,” suggesting that the controversy was being amplified beyond its actual significance.[1][2]
Some Republicans, including Senator Tim Scott, called for the post to be removed, though the White House’s initial framing treated the matter as a misunderstanding rather than intentional misconduct, later attributing it to a mistake by a staffer after initially defending it as a meme.[2]
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