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MAGA Is Anti-Black
No matter what Trump or his allies allege, the video depicting the Obamas as apes is entirely consistent with their racist worldview; for them, Black is ugly, dangerous, and savage, while white is beautiful, safe, and civilized.
Feb 08, 2026
On February 5, a video was posted on President Donald Trump’s Truth Social account depicting former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes in a jungle. The racist depiction of Black people as primates dates back centuries. It is meant to represent them as ugly, savage, and unintelligent—as fundamentally incapable of building a human (white) civilization.
The post was deleted 12 hours later. The White House initially blamed an unnamed staffer for posting it. One White House adviser told reporters, “The president was not aware of that video, and was very let down by the staffer who put it out.” Apparently, they forgot that Trump himself had claimed that only he and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino have access to his social media account.
Later that day, Trump admitted that he knew about the video before its posting. He told reporters, “I looked at the beginning of [the video]. It was fine.” He then added, “Nobody knew that that was at the end. If they would have looked, they would have had the sense to take it down.” Neither the current president of the United States nor his staff is apparently capable of watching a 1-minute video before posting it.
Trump refused to apologize, insisting that he “didn’t make a mistake.”
In some respects, Leavitt is right—that Truth Social post shouldn’t surprise anyone. Trump is the nation’s Racist-in-Chief.
Notably, even conservatives condemned the post (albeit meekly). Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) posted on Twitter-X that this is “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) shared Scott’s post, writing, “Tim is right. This was appalling.” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) similarly wrote: “This post was offensive. I’m glad the White House took it down.”
Democrats, by contrast, used stronger language. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said, “Fuck Donald Trump and his vile, racist, and malignant behavior.” Finally, bipartisanship has been achieved!
Despite this outcry, the White House was quick to dismiss the post as being anything newsworthy. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt demanded that journalists “please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
MAGA and Anti-Black Racism
In some respects, Leavitt is right—that Truth Social post shouldn’t surprise anyone. Trump is the nation’s Racist-in-Chief. It’s a slow day indeed if that video is the only racist thing Trump did all day.
In recent months, he has referred to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a sitting Black congresswoman, as “a disgusting person, a loser,” and “garbage.” Trump says that she, a US citizen, “should be thrown the hell out of our country.” To emphasize, not her country, but “our country.”
More broadly, he says that Somalis are “low IQ people” and that Somalia is “barely a nation.” It “stinks” and is “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.” For Trump, Somalis are savage, ugly, uncivilized, and unintelligent people—fundamentally distinct from the “nice people” from civilized societies like Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Notice the direct parallels between how Trump explicitly describes Somalis on the one hand, and the underlying racist meaning behind comparing Black people to primates on the other. Trump is applying the exact same set of stereotypes in both instances.
For MAGA Republicans, that success is always vulnerable to the threat of “foreign cultures” and Black immigrants, which in this case include both Ilhan Omar and Barack Obama.
Somalia is not the only example. He refers to Haiti as a “shithole” and “hellhole.” That Haitians are “eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.” This narrative—not only wildly racist, but demonstrably false—was amplified by several Republicans, including Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.), Representative Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) and then-Vice President-Elect JD Vance.
Trump’s racism is not an anomaly among MAGA Republicans. Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller remarks, “If Somalians cannot make Somalia successful, why would we think that the track will be any different in the United States? If Libya keeps failing, if the Central African Republic keeps failing, if Somalia keeps failing, right? If these societies all over the world continue to fail, you have to ask yourself, […] what do we think is going to happen?" For Miller, no matter where those people go, the result will be the same: “consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.” Test scores will also consistently drop: “If you subtract immigration out of test scores, all of a sudden our test scores skyrocket!” Like Trump, for Miller, Africans and their descendants are incapable of building a human (white) civilization.
Indirectly, Trump applies this standard to Obama too. Per Trump’s birther conspiracy theory, Obama was born in Kenya. At the same time he promoted that lie, Trump insisted that Obama allowed the US to collapse to the level of “a third world country.” Taken together, from Trump’s perspective, Obama is an African immigrant whose “destructive” policies led to the country “dying.” This is precisely what he and others in his administration allege that African immigrants always do.
A MAGA Black History Month
One might (confusedly) object that all of this is xenophobia, not anti-Black racism specifically—truly a distinction without a difference.
On February 3, Trump issued a proclamation emphasizing that “the history of black Americans is an indispensable chapter in our grand American country.” Thus, he calls upon “public officials, educators, librarians, and all the people of the United States to observe [Black History Month] with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.”
Yet, this objection overlooks a crucial detail: Trump’s proclamation is explicitly not a recognition of diversity—“This month, however, we do not celebrate our differences.” For Trump, Black History Month is not a celebration of Black people, but rather of the ability of “black American heroes” to successfully embrace and defend the “very special culture” that America and Europe inherited. Importantly, for Trump and his allies, the values, beliefs, and principles of that special culture are uniquely white.
This is the white-washed version of Black History Month that MAGA recognizes—one where Black people’s contributions to America are completely divorced from their lived experiences; where it is white values that abolish slavery, end discrimination, and save the nation.
Trump is not honoring Black arts, culture, or philosophy. He is calling on us to remember Black people’s “enduring commitment to the American principles of liberty, justice and equality.” It is those principles that freed the Western Hemisphere from “empires, ended slavery, saved Europe, put a man on the moon, and built the freest, most just, and most prosperous society ever known to mankind.” Black patriots like Coretta Scott King, Booker T. Washington, and Thomas Sowell “fiercely defended the values set forth in the Declaration of Independence and helped to make our Republic the greatest country in the history of the world.”
For Trump, America’s “bedrock belief in equality” is inextricably tied to the nation’s Christian foundation and the belief that all are equal under God. It is that belief “that drove black American icons to help fulfill the promise of [America’s] principles.”
What Trump is expressing here is entirely consistent with the racist worldview that he and other MAGA Republicans endorse. Black values and cultures ruin societies, while white values uplift them. This is why Haiti, Somalia, Central African Republic, and Libya fail to develop, while the US thrives. If Black people succeed, it is because they have championed Christian and Enlightenment (white) principles and values. This is the white-washed version of Black History Month that MAGA recognizes—one where Black people’s contributions to America are completely divorced from their lived experiences; where it is white values that abolish slavery, end discrimination, and save the nation.
For MAGA Republicans, that success is always vulnerable to the threat of “foreign cultures” and Black immigrants, which in this case include both Ilhan Omar and Barack Obama. This vulnerability is why US cities like Baltimore, where more than half the residents are Black, can become “dangerous,” “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”
No matter what Trump or his allies allege, the video depicting the Obamas as apes is entirely consistent with their racist worldview. In every instance, their comments reflect the same underlying dichotomy: Black is ugly, dangerous, and savage, while white is beautiful, safe, and civilized. This is true whether they explicitly state it or metaphorically represent it.
It is this racism that leads Trump to blame Black Americans for violent crimes. It is this racism that leads the Trump administration to invade Minnesota. It is this “racial and national origin animus” that spurs their desire to end Temporary Protection Status for Haitians. It is this racism that makes everyone, regardless of race or citizenship status, vulnerable to the Trump administration’s Christian and ethnonationalist agenda. It is this racism that we must all resist.
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Memo to MAGA: Big Government Drives Economic Growth
Since at least World War II, the most dynamic sectors of the American economy have been developed in large part by federal government planning and heavy financial investment.
Jan 01, 2026
Few epithets are more heavily utilized among President Donald Trump and his supporters than “socialist” and “communist.” In MAGA’s deeply paranoid Bircher sensibility, “socialism” and even “communism” are defined as even the slightest expansion of governmental intervention in the economy—especially in favor of marginalized groups. In MAGA’s worldview, such interventions are a harbinger of the sort of massive societal disintegration seen in recent years in President Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela—if not the second coming of Stalinist totalitarianism.
As in so much else in the MAGA worldview, its views on economics have little relation to reality. For it is a fact that since at least World War II, the most dynamic sectors of the American economy (revolving around high tech) have been developed in large part by federal government planning and heavy financial investment. Since World War II, initially on the pretext of Cold War defense spending, technologies from computers and the internet to Google, lifesaving pharmaceuticals, and the components of cell phones have been developed by heavily government-subsidized researchers at universities and private companies. The government agencies providing the subsidies included the CIA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health, and especially the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
This crucial role of government investment in economic success (in the United States as well as Western Europe and East Asia) is generally unknown in MAGA world and even among Americans of a more educated and civilized worldview. But a small group of scholars have explored this fact, ranging from Noam Chomsky to former Richard Nixon adviser Kevin Phillips in his 2003 book Wealth and Democracy. In more recent years, it has been explored by Professor Mariana Mazzucato of University College, London. Mazzucato has served as an adviser to Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom and US Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in the United States.
As Bill Gates, a prime beneficiary of this government investment, explained in a 2015 interview with The Atlantic, “Since World War II, US government [funded] R&D has defined the state of the art” in almost every advanced sector of the American economy. Gates noted, for example, that it was the Pentagon’s DARPA which provided R&D investment in the 1960s and 70s which laid the foundation for the modern internet. DARPA’s investment was crucial, Gates noted, because as far as being a source of economic innovation, “the private sector is in general inept.” Because of a lack of guaranteed short-term profit, the private sector often refuses to invest in the early stages of development of technologies like the internet. By the 1980’s, the internet had developed to such an extent that many private companies saw its commercial potential and desired partnership with the federal government’s NSF—which had taken over the internet in the 1980s from the Pentagon’s DARPA—to pursue its further evolution. By the mid-1990s, in a somewhat opaque process, the NSF had fully transferred control of the internet to private sector companies.
AI: Big Government Drives Trump Economy
Then there is Artificial Intelligence (AI), the current massive private sector investment that is—according to many experts—the primary factor keeping an otherwise weak US economy afloat since Trump returned to the White House. The foundations for AI were laid by massive government investment in R&D beginning in the 1950s as the Center for Strategic and International Studies explained in October:
Although recent breakthroughs in AI have largely been funded by the private sector, the foundations of modern AI were built through decades of federally funded research. Following World War Two, government agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) invested in early AI experiments, such as the first AI program in the 1950s, the first chatbot in the 1960s, and rules-based systems for medical diagnosis in the 1970s. Indeed, public funding advanced many core capabilities like machine learning, neural networks, computer vision, and natural-language processing, which the private sector then developed into the AI systems we use today. In 2024, the House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence released a report of its own, acknowledging that the United States “has maintained its AI leadership largely due to continued and consistent federal investments in AI R&D over decades."
Big Government Trumpism
During the initial monologue on his November 2, 2015 radio program, Rush Limbaugh ridiculed the above quoted Bill Gates interview; he called Gates’ notion—that government subsidy of high tech R&D had fueled America’s post-World War II economic growth—as among the “craziest, most nonsensical things” he had ever heard in his life.
It seems fair to state that whatever else one might say about him, Bill Gates possesses a much more realistic view of how the world really works than the late Mr. Limbaugh did. It also seems fair to state that even Trump administration policymakers have the same better understanding than Limbaugh.
For all his anti-establishment grandstanding, Trump is just as committed—perhaps more so—to furthering militarism and the economic exploitation of the working class in the US and around the world as any of his Democrat or Republican predecessors.
After all, the Trump administration has been quietly putting tens of billions of taxpayer dollars in service of the private sector, particularly in subsidies for AI’s continued development. The publicly stated rational for such subsidies is national security, specifically the military and economic competition with China. Trump has even spearheaded the purchase by the federal government of shares in a handful of private sector companies in economically vital areas like minerals, steel, and semiconductors.
Normally Trump supporters would object to the federal government buying up shares of private companies. Relatively few of them seem to have even taken notice of Trump doing so, perhaps because Fox News, Newsmax, or their favorite talk radio demagogues have given little or no sustained coverage of it.
The bottom line is that even if some benefits from the Trump administration’s investments do trickle down to America’s working class—or they somehow help fuel long-term American economic dynamism—it is fair to say that his administration is using those investments first and foremost to benefit its billionaire supporters in Silicon Valley and the armaments industry. For all his anti-establishment grandstanding, Trump is just as committed—perhaps more so—to furthering militarism and the economic exploitation of the working class in the US and around the world as any of his Democrat or Republican predecessors. It would be nice if Americans—whether MAGA adherents or not—would become aware of this dynamic and mobilize against it.
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Trump Intensifies His Crusade to Re-Whiten America
In the past two weeks alone, we’ve witnessed Trump’s racist rants against the Somali community in Minnesota, the freezing of all non-white asylum bids, and denial of citizenship rights for long-time legal immigrants from non-white majority nations.
Dec 11, 2025
As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence nears, President Donald Trump’s escalating attacks on immigrants of color has made his administration the most globally racist, hostile administration for non-white immigrants in US history, on top of its aggressively implemented racist policies in the US and around the world.
In the past two weeks alone, we’ve witnessed Trump’s racist rants against the Somali community in Minnesota, the freezing of all non-white asylum bids, and denial of citizenship rights for long-time legal immigrants from non-white majority nations. These come on top of the increasingly violent assaults and deportations of mostly brown and Black people, including citizens, solely based on skin color, language, and where they work.
The November 26 shooting, one fatally, of two National Guard members in Washington was the pretext for the latest intensification of Trump’s anti-non-white immigrant crusade. The shooter was a troubled Afghan former member of the CIA’s notorious “Zero Unit” death squads in Afghanistan who was resettled in the US after the war’s end. But the context is clothed in years of Trump’s demonization of immigrants from what he called “Third World”—and even “shithole”—countries, that has been a centerpiece of Trump’s political career. It has accompanied “Great Replacement” conspiracy theories of Democrats allegedly organizing immigrants of color to flood the US to supplant white voters, and an increasing normalization of racist rhetoric by the far-right.
In the aftermath of the shooting, Trump posted on his Truth Social his intent to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the US system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions… and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk.”
All of which is directly tied to the vision of a Make America Great Again movement that fantasizes a return to eras of Jim Crow segregation, even antebellum, policies in a nation more dominated by white, Christian populations.
On December 2, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt verified that "refugee admissions into the country right now are essentially at 0, with the exception of Afrikaners fleeing persecution in South Africa." Many sources have debunked Trump’s promotion of the myth of a “white genocide” in South Africa, while he has also stated preference for white Europeans who oppose migration.
That same day Trump launched his vile denunciation of Somali residents, calling Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and “her friends” “garbage,” adding “when they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from.” Omar had a strong rebuttal: "When I think about Stephen Miller and his white supremacist rhetoric, it reminds me of the way the Nazis described Jewish people in Germany." And, she warned, “It's also really important for us to remember that this kind of hateful rhetoric and this level of dehumanizing can lead to dangerous actions by people who listen to the president."
Trump’s racist demagogy against immigrants of color is not new, but this tirade went further, noted Joanne Freeman, professor of History and American Studies at Yale University in a Jon Stewart podcast. “On the one hand, saying Somalians are a horrible people is a horrible thing to do. To go the next step and say, so we should throw them out, so they shouldn't be here. That's the part that suddenly not only moves into hatred and ugliness… and I've got my guys in masks… (and am) willing to enforce them in a way that isn't constitutional.”
What’s also new is the administration denying citizenship to immigrants taking the final step at naturalization events, as occurred on December 4 in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, despite their having spent years “acquiring a green card, extensive interviews, background checks, classes, and a citizenship test.” Instead, “as they lined up, some were told by US Citizenship and Immigration Services officials that they couldn’t proceed due to their countries of origin”—19 countries from the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.
“Officers were asking everyone what country they were from, and if they said a certain country, they were told to step out of line and that their oath ceremonies were canceled,” Gail Breslow, executive director of Project Citizenship, told Boston’s WGBH. It comes as the administration is “detaining applicants at citizenship appointments—an escalation that blurs the line between immigration processing and enforcement, leaving families completely unprepared.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol raids continue to terrorize immigrant communities, enabled by the Supreme Court’s authorization of the selective targeting of people based on racial profiling, as well as the indifference to assaulting legal immigrants and even American citizens. Among the latest targets for harassment and detentions, following Trump’s threats, were Somalis in Minnesota, even though more than 70% of Somalis are American citizens. The New York Times reaffirmed on December 4 that less than 30% “of the people arrested in any of these operations had been convicted of a crime,” despite Trump’ claims that his secret police would only target the “worst of the worst.”
For Trump, racism has long been a fundamental belief, illustrated again December 6 by the decision to eliminate free entrance days to national parks on the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King and Juneteenth, while adding Trump’s birthday. Additionally, Trump and other MAGA politicians have normalized a yearning to maintain the historic “culture” of the US and make the US the protector of “European civilization”—both an openly racist appeal to reverse the increased racial diversity of the nation. In a Twitter screed attacking NATO members December 6 following a trip to Brussels, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau declared, “Either the great nations of Europe are our partners in protecting the Western civilization that we inherited from them or they are not.”
All of which is directly tied to the vision of a Make America Great Again movement that fantasizes a return to eras of Jim Crow segregation, even antebellum, policies in a nation more dominated by white, Christian populations. As Florida Republican Rep. Kat Cammarck framed it December 2 in a not very subtle message: "Today, 1 in 6 people in the US is foreign born. That quite frankly is not sustainable to maintain a culture that we are known for here in the United States."
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