A racist trope, and attack on voting

The video posted by Trump depicting the Obamas as apes is not only vile. It escalates the assault on elections ahead of the midterms.

- ANITA CHABRIA COLUMNIST

ALEX BRANDON Associated Press

PRESIDENT TRUMP smiles after signing a bill that ended a partial shutdown.

Welcome to Black History Month, 2026 style.

President Trump posted a video Thursday to his social media site that contains animated images depicting former President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama as apes.

The White House took down the post Friday, and after first calling it nothing more than a meme, they dubbed it a mistake by a staffer. Sure.

But while the justifiable outrage over this overt racism spins itself into a brief media circus (because we all know something else will come along in about three minutes), let's look a bit deeper into why this video is more than an affront to everything America stands for, or should stand for, anyway.

It's no accident that the images of the Obamas are embedded deep inside a video about voter fraud conspiracies from the 2020 election (which are untrue, if I need to say it again). This video is an escalation in the assault that is likely to come on voting rights and voting access in the midterms.

“Absolutely, there’s a connection to the vote,” Melina Abdullah told me Friday. She’s a professor at Cal State L.A. and co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles.

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

I caught Levin the day after he turned in a chapter about authoritarianism for anew book, which happens to look at how discrimination and the imposition of social hierarchies ties in with power.