Donald Trump supercharged his political career by claiming that Barack Obama wasn’t American. Yesterday, 16 minutes before midnight, the president’s account on Truth Social posted a video that suggests Obama isn’t even human. It briefly shows the head of the first Black president and that of his wife superimposed onto the bodies of apes. They dance along to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
The video, which Trump’s account shared twice, seems to be a screen recording. Its first minute shows a clip promoting the lie that voting-machine tampering handed Joe Biden the presidency in 2020. Then, someone seems to swipe up, and the clip depicting the Obamas as apes flashes into focus.
The video, which Trump’s account shared twice, seems to be a screen recording. Its first minute shows a clip promoting the lie that voting-machine tampering handed Joe Biden the presidency in 2020. Then, someone seems to swipe up, and the clip depicting the Obamas as apes flashes into focus.
The clip is on the screen for only a moment before the recording returns to the voting-machine video. And just before noon today, both posts of the video were removed from the president’s Truth Social account. (When I asked why, a White House official who declined to provide their name claimed that an unnamed employee “erroneously made the post.”)
In the interim, hundreds if not thousands of people responded to the clip with enthusiasm. Immediately after the video was first posted on Truth Social, the memecoin $APEBAMA was minted. Within 12 hours, more than $4 million worth of $APEBAMA had been traded back and forth.
The “joke” that Trump’s account spread is plainly sinister. The idea that Black people sit somewhere between white people and apes has long been used to justify cruelty. In 1377, a historian wrote that Africans “have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals,” meaning they “are, as a whole, submissive to slavery.” Cartoons circulated during the Civil War were printed with images similar to the one Trump posted: One labels a monkey holding a book upside down as a negro-man;
The ape caricature still colors how Black people are received in America. But this morning, the administration played the video off for laughs. “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in response to a comment request before the Truth Social posts were removed. (The Lion King features a monkey named Rafiki, but no apes appear in the film.) The White House did not answer my questions about why the administration initially defended the video, or why it remained up on the president’s account for 12 hours. Even if a staffer did post the Obama video, its message is resonant with the president’s past statements and actions. Trump has called Somalis “low-IQ,” and his administration recently announced rules that will ban nearly 90 percent of African immigrant visa applicants.
Full article can be found: https://archive.ph/SuWQW#selection-803.0-815.38