Trump Posted His Obama Ape Video. The Power Move Is Laughing At Him
Here we go again, Y’all.
Another day in America. Another racist rerun.
Somebody wakes up. Stretches. Feels insecure about their own humanity, then reaches for the oldest insult in the archive and calls Black people apes, monkeys, or jungle creatures. At this point, it’s not shocking. It’s tired and predictable as hell.
The latest version of this ritual is being played out during Black History Month. Late Thursday, Donald Trump shared a video depicting the Obamas as apes, portraying other Democratic leaders as wild animals, and casting himself as the self-styled “king of the jungle.” Which is weird because this reads like fragile masculinity needing to photoshop itself into the animal kingdom just to feel like it’s at the top of something.
The lion version was at least a cleaner lie. The lion looked stronger. The lion walked like it knew what it was and didn’t need a meme to convince itself it mattered.
Trump later deleted the video amid bipartisan backlash.
The post didn’t emerge from nowhere, and it isn’t just about one offensive video. It sits inside a centuries-long pattern of white America using animal imagery to strip Black people of humanity while reinforcing racial hierarchy for political, social, and psychological gain. This is centuries of cartoons, sermons, textbooks, “science,” films, memes, and political propaganda trying to downgrade ours. Pamphlets. Slave-auction broadsides. Phrenology charts. Minstrel stages. Colonial travel diaries. Zoo exhibits. Postcards. Early film. Advertising. News. Now memes and AI videos. Same story. Different technology. Same lie, just upgraded for faster distribution.
The technology changes, and so does the medium and audience. But the goal stays the same: dehumanize Black people, then play dumb when folks recognize the playbook.
Honestly? I laughed. I laughed at the video
It wasn’t coping laughter or nervous laughter. I laughed at how stupid it was. I laughed at how small it felt. I laughed because when you’ve spent years studying and dissecting whiteness, European history, colonial archives, and the machinery of racial myth-making, this stuff stops reading as shocking. It starts reading as predictable. It starts reading as insecurity performing itself out loud.
Because what does it say that Black people have been called monkeys, apes, jungle creatures for four hundred years? Why do white folks keep needing this?
Because you don’t run the same lie for four centuries unless you’re afraid of what happens without it. You don’t repeat something for that long unless it is doing heavy psychological and political work. That kind of repetition is taught, inherited, and reinforced through media, education, religion, science, law, and culture until it feels like common sense to the people who benefit from it.
And I’m not doing Racism History 101 every time somebody posts a monkey, banana, watermelon, or jungle meme. Folks already know the history. That’s why they keep doing it. You don’t accidentally land on 400 years of the same imagery. That’s not a coincidence. What we’re seeing is a transgenerational script. It’s pathetic.
Because those tropes were never really about Black people. They were about permission. White folks needed permission to steal, colonize, enslave, exploit, exclude, and brutalize while still calling themselves civilized and the so-called “master race.”
You don’t spend four centuries obsessively trying to define another group as less human unless your own identity is tied to that comparison. Hierarchies require a bottom. If the people at the bottom are recognized as fully human, the entire moral story starts to crack. So the trope keeps coming back. It has to. Not because it’s clever or effective, but because it’s stabilizing for people who were taught that their place in the world depends on somebody else being seen as less evolved, less worthy, less human.
Which is why I’m not interested in performing Black humanity on demand so somebody can decide whether they believe it today. At this point, if you don’t understand why this is racist, you don’t want to understand. So instead of defending, let’s do a collective return to sender.
Because this isn’t really about Black people. It’s about a long historical habit of racist white folks needing somebody else to be “the animal” so they never have to interrogate the violence, conquest, and extraction that built their sense of fake sense of civilization in the first place.
And for all the folks saying Trump “crossed the line” . . . what line? That framing assumes there was ever a version of this politics that wasn’t built on dehumanization. For people paying attention, this isn’t a line-crossing moment. It’s pattern confirmation.
The real play is distraction. Every time this happens, the public conversation gets sucked into debating whether something is racist, as if that’s still a mystery worth solving, instead of asking what power moves are happening while everybody is busy arguing about the spectacle.
So laugh at them!
Pity them, if you have the emotional energy. Turn your nose up at them. But don’t get stuck performing outrage on demand. Don’t waste your time trying to convince people committed to racial hierarchy that you are human. History has already settled that question. Science settled that question. Reality settles that question every single day.
It is destabilizing to racists when their racism doesn’t make you mad. Racism is designed to provoke, to humiliate, to bait, to trigger emotional reaction, and to force you into a defensive posture where you’re explaining your humanity to someone who has already decided to deny it. That reaction is part of the script. It reassures them that they still have the power to wound you.
So when you laugh, you break the script. When you laugh, you’re not saying it doesn’t matter. You’re saying you see it. You recognize it. And you refuse to let it control your emotional reality. Because if racism doesn’t scare you, doesn’t silence you, doesn’t force you to perform your humanity for approval, then it loses one of its oldest tools: psychological dominance.
See these tropes for what they are: not proof of power, but echoes of an old world that had to invent monsters to justify conquest, slavery, and extraction. These are the ideological descendants of colonizers and people shaped by systems built on conquest, theft, murder, slavery, and racial caste. And systems like that don’t just vanish. They leave scripts, reflexes, and obsessions.
Trump and his racist ilk need the monkey tropes. Because some people still need the story so they can live with their awful selves and racial inheritances. They still need us to be cast as the animal so they can pretend they’re not. They reach for the joke not because it works. But because they don’t know who they are without it.
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