The Sad Truth Behind the Reaction to Trump’s Sick Meme

Even Republicans will condemn overt bigotry. But systemic racism remains mostly unchallenged by those on the right.

By Shalise Manza Young

I have long been convinced that, to a fair number of people in this country, racism starts and stops with spitting in the face of a Black woman and calling her a dirty ni**er.

And if you aren’t walking the streets of your town doing that, then, by golly, there’s no way you can be racist.

Photo by wyyz on Unsplash

Friday only bolstered my belief in that theory. Because it wasn’t until Friday, when Donald Trump posted a meme to his social media account depicting former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama as apes that we saw multiple members of the congressional chapter of the MAGA cult condemn Trump’s action.

This is the kind of bigotry almost everyone can publicly condemn. It’s obvious. It’s essentially spitting in the face of two accomplished and beloved Americans who ascended to the White House and reminding them that to a certain segment of the populace they will always be ni**ers.

The meme was disgusting, and like so much of what rolls around in Trump’s increasingly addled brain, the image is a relic of decades past. There’s nothing new about comparing African Americans to primates; it’s a way to portray us as subhuman and therefore not deserving of basic dignity or rights.

(Also not new: Trump’s seething hatred of African Americans. He has hated us his entire miserable life. There’s decades of evidence of it, often coming from his own thin, rarely smiling lips.)

Which is why Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) felt emboldened — please read that as sarcasm — to tweet that Trump’s post was “totally unacceptable” and urge the Fanta-hued fascist to apologize, which, of course, would never happen.

And yet there’s no record that Wicker has said anything publicly about Trump calling Haiti and nations on the African continent “shithole countries,” or his repeated, vile targeting of Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and her fellow Somalis living in the state.

Those are examples of racism.

As chair of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, Wicker rallied confirmation votes for Pete Hegseth as Defense secretary, even as Hegseth wondered in a 2024 book whether then-Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. C.Q. Brown — who served over 40 years with the Air Force — got the job “because of his skin color? Or was it his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt.” There was also a report that a drunken Hegseth chanted “kill all Muslims!” at a bar in 2015, but neither was disqualifying for Wicker.

Those are examples of racism.

It’s apparently news to Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) that Trump has always loathed people who look like Scott. Scott was stunned — stunned! — to see the post denigrating the Obamas, tweeting that he was “praying” it was fake because it was “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”

This is the same Tim Scott who didn’t vote in favor of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would have restored and strengthened the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a monumental achievement that Black Americans on whose shoulders Scott stands fought, bled, and died for.

That is racism. Yes, anti-Black behavior can come from Black people; Scott is like Stephen from “Django Unchained,” foolishly believing that if he just acts right, the white man will love him. He repeatedly debased himself during the 2024 campaign in the hope that he would be named vice president or to a Cabinet post, at one point exclaiming, “I just love you!,” to Trump when Trump noted that Scott was supporting him instead of his fellow South Carolinian Nikki Haley. He got nothing from Trump for his fealty.

When Black folk say “All skinfolk ain’t kinfolk,” we’re speaking of people like Scott.

Other Republicans, like Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, and Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, all took to X to criticize the post, yet they’ve all remained silent on numerous moves by the regime and the reinforcement of structural racism that does actual harm to Black Americans and, by extension, affects millions more from other demographic groups:

• Shuttering the Civil Rights Division of the Environmental Protective Agency that works to ensure Americans of all races and backgrounds have clean water and clean air;

• Gutting major federal departments that employed high numbers of Black women, leading to a stark rise in unemployment for that cohort;

• Threatening schools and colleges with cuts to federal aid dollars if they don’t eliminate anything and everything that could be seen as diversity, equity, and inclusion, i.e. possibly benefitting Black students;

• Repeating that most jobs should only go to “the best and brightest” and that he wants to be “color blind and merit-based,” insinuating that Black people could never fit that standard;

• Making a PSA of sorts encouraging white men to reach out to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission if they feel like they’ve been discriminated against in the workplace (not for nothing, but if as recently as 2023 87.5% of Fortune 500 C-suite roles were held by white people, doesn’t it stand to reason that those whiny men are being “discriminated against” by white-led corporations?).

And those are a small sampling of things that have happened in just the past year. The list goes on and on.

Again, the anti-Black actions of Trump and his regime aren’t new: Politicians and bureaucrats have spent much of the 160 years since enslaving humans was abolished finding ways to keep us poorer and in worse health and more of us prisons than any other group in the country.

But to borrow from the Notorious BIG, those moves are supposed to be made in silence and violence. Not with a video clip so filthy even ardent supporters of inequity feel they have to speak up.

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