Welcome to Black History Month, 2026 style.
President Trump posted a video on his social media site Thursday that features animated images depicting former President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama as monkeys.
The White House canceled the post on Friday, and after calling it more than a meme, they called it a mistake by a staffer. Sure.
But while the justified outrage over this blatant racism turns into a brief media circus (because we all know something else will pop up in about three minutes), let’s dig a little deeper into why this video is more than just an affront to everything America stands for, or should stand for anyway.
It’s no coincidence that Obama footage is embedded deep into a video about voter fraud conspiracies in the 2020 election (which are untrue, if I have to say it again). This video is an escalation of the attack that will likely take place on voting rights and access to voting in the midterms.
“Absolutely, there is a connection to the vote,” Melina Abdullah told me on Friday. She is a professor at Cal State LA and co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles.
Read more: Trump refuses to apologize after sharing racist Obama image: ‘I did nothing wrong’
“This is about more than just Obama,” added Brian Levin, professor emeritus at Cal State San Bernardino and founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. “It’s about people who are [perceived as] undermining our elections and democracy.”
I caught up with Levin the day after he submitted a chapter on authoritarianism for a new book, which happens to look at how discrimination and the imposition of social hierarchies relate to power.
Let me summarize. Vulnerable groups are destroyed as dangerous and unfit to be full citizens, so a smaller group of elites can justify power by any means to protect society from these easy and nasty influences.
Let me further simplify the message: black and brown people are evil and should not be allowed to participate in democracy because they do not deserve the right.
How does this play out at the ballot box?
All the talk about voter ID and election integrity is really about stopping people from voting – people who are legally entitled to vote. Those least likely to be able to obtain proof of citizenship—which might require a passport or birth certificate, along with the money and knowledge to obtain such documents—are often people of color or brown. They are also often poor or poorer and therefore have less time and money to obtain documents, and also live in the urban areas where they share polling stations.
Is it so far-fetched to imagine some kind of federal surveillance at those kinds of polling places, turning away — or simply intimidating — the legal voters who have long made up a powerful bloc of the Democratic base?
Let’s hope it never happens. But the current undermining of the legitimacy of black and brown voters is, Levin and Abdullah said, systemic and troubling.
Trump’s latest video is “part of a deluge of bigotry and conspiracy around the election and immigrants and people of color, and it’s important to condemn the way these puzzle pieces are put together to label African Americans and immigrants as a threat to democracy in terms of voting,” Levin said.
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 Obama have been oddly inserted as almost a subliminal flash near the end.
If you missed the white supremacist posts that have now become commonplace in official government communications such as those from the Departments of Labor and Homeland Security, let me assure you that Levin is correct and that this primate video is indeed part of a “fire” of white nationalist rhetoric coming not just 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 attention to punishing diversity, equity, and inclusion. Just this week, another federal agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, opened an investigation into Nike for allegedly discriminating against white people in employment.
“It wasn’t even a dog whistle, but a xerox of exactly the kind of terms I’ve been looking for decades on white supremacist and neo-Nazi websites,” Levin said.
It is not my place or intention 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, authoritarianism affects everyone. This video is a clear statement that Trump’s vision of America is one in which every non-white group, every vulnerable group, indeed, is a second-class citizen.
“He’s enabling a whole group of people who want to take this country back to a time when violent white supremacy was enabled by law,” Abdullah said. “What they mean is recapturing an oppressive, old-school racism that is pre-1965, pre-Voting Rights Act.”
Read more: Chabria: MAGA launches another “Save the Children” campaign targeting LGBTQ+ families
That message, Levin said, “resonates with a decent portion of his base” and, when fed relentlessly into the system, can have violent results.
Levin uses the example of Trump tweeting during the 2020 protests over the killing of George Floyd: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” a phrase with a violent and racist history.
Levin said people of color have always been the primary targets of hate crimes in the United States, but after that tweet, it was some of the “worst days” for racially motivated violence.
“When a high-ranking broadcaster like a president circulates images of prejudice, it creates these stereotypes and conspiracy theories, which are then the basis for other conspiracy theories and bullying,” he added.
Abdullah said he worries that even if voter suppression isn’t officially sanctioned, those empowered conspiracy theorists will take action anyway.
“So the people who are the so-called monitors, the self-styled monitors … that’s the one that’s going to get people out of the voter ranks, so that’s what he’s intentionally attracting,” she said.
Keep your eye on the ball, folks, because the far-right Republicans who run the show are fixated on him. The mid-term elections must go their way for them to stay in power.
The easiest way to ensure that the result is to allow only voters who see things their way.
Get the LA Times California Politics newsletter. In-depth information on law, politics and policy from Sacramento, Washington and beyond delivered to your inbox twice a week.
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.