In a racist video depicting Obama as a monkey, Trump makes it clear what’s next

Welcome to black history month, 2026 style.

President Trump posted a video on Thursday on his social media account featuring cartoons depicting former President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama as monkeys.

The White House took down the post on Friday, and after calling it a meme, they mistakenly named a staffer. Of course.

But while the apparent outrage about this racism is making itself into a short media circus (because we all know something else will come in about three minutes), let’s take a closer look at why this video is more than an insult to everything America stands for, or should stand for, anyway.

It’s no accident that the Obamas’ photos are embedded deep into a video about voter fraud tactics in the 2020 election (untrue, if I need to say it again). This video is a escalating attack on voting rights and access to voting in midterms.

“Definitely, there is a connection in the vote,” Melina Abdullah told me on Friday. He is a professor at Cal State Los Angeles and the founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles.

“This is more than just Obama,” added Brian Levin, a senior professor at Cal State San Bernardino and founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. “It’s about people like that [perceived as] we undermine our elections and our democracy.”

I caught up with Levin the day after he opened a chapter on the authorship of a new book, which happens to look at how racism and social hierarchy are connected to power.

Let me summarize. Vulnerable groups are marginalized as dangerous and unfit to be full citizens, so a small group of elites can justify power in any way to protect society from these low and negative influences.

Let me make that message 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 this talk about voter identification and election integrity is really about stopping people from voting – people who are legally entitled to vote. Those most likely to be unable to obtain proof of citizenship – which may require a passport or birth certificate, as well as the money and knowledge to obtain such documents – are often black or brown. They are also often poor, or very poor, so they have little time and money to invest in obtaining documents, and they live in urban areas where they share polling places.

Is it too much of a stretch to imagine some kind of federal oversight of those kinds of polling places, turning away from — or simply scaring off — the legitimate voters who have long made up a staunch bloc of the Democratic base?

Let’s hope that doesn’t happen. But the current underestimation of the eligibility of Black and black voters, Levin and Abdullah say, is systematic and concerning.

Trump’s latest video is “part of the racism and conspiracy related to the election and immigrants and Black people and it is important to criticize the way these episodes are combined to label African Americans and immigrants as a threat to democracy in terms of the vote,” said Levin.

The premise of the video in question is that Democrats have engaged in an elaborate, decades-long scheme to steal elections. It’s presented as a documentary, and images of the Obamas are inserted in an almost subliminal way towards the end.

If you missed the white supremacist postings that have become commonplace in official government communications like those coming out of the Department of Labor and Homeland Security, let me confirm that Levin is right and this primate video is actually part of the “firehose” of white nationalist rhetoric not only from Trump, but from the federal government as a whole.

The Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice, for example, has turned its focus to penal diversity, equity and inclusion. Just this week, another federal agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, launched an investigation into Nike for alleged discrimination against white people in hiring.

“It wasn’t even a dogfight, but a Xeroxing of the kind of words I’ve been looking at on the websites of white supremacists and neo-Nazis for decades,” Levin said.

It is not my place or purpose 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, approval is directed at everyone. This video is a clear statement that Trump’s vision of America is one where all non-white groups, all vulnerable groups, are second-class citizens.

“You’re allowing a whole group of people who want to take this country back to a time when white supremacist violence is legalized,” Abdullah said. “What they’re saying is rehashing the old school, pre-1965 racism, the Pre-Voting Rights Act.”

That message, Levin said, “has a voice that has a decent portion of its base,” and when it’s endlessly put into the system, it can have violent consequences.

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 statement with a history of violence and racism.

Levin said that black people have always been the main victims of hate crimes in the United States, but after that tweet, it was one of the “worst days” of racially motivated violence.

“When a big broadcaster, like the president, broadcasts images related to racism, it creates these ideas and conspiracy theories, which are the basis of the ideology and violence that goes on,” he added.

Abdullah said he was worried that even if polling booths were to be legally sanctioned, those powerful conspirators would still take action.

“So the people who call themselves ‘vigilantes,’ self-appointed vigilantes … are the ones who will be pulling people out of the voter queues, so this is what they are deliberately mocking,” he said.

Keep your eye on the ball, folks, because far-right Republicans are running the show they’re obsessed with. The mid-term elections must go their way to keep them in power.

The easiest way to ensure the result is to only allow voters who see things their way.